


A Yellow Streak

by Anonymous



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:15:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 20
Words: 23,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25027546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Of the thirty-six stratagems, the last and best stratagem is: to run away.Sasuke and Sakura, in the Forest of Death. Orochimaru's curse seal finds a different victim — but who can outrun their destiny?
Relationships: Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Sasuke
Comments: 86
Kudos: 159
Collections: Anonymous





	1. Chapter 1

The strange thing was, even in the Forest of Death, the cicadas still cried, _jii— jii—_ in the late summer heat.

When the giant snake came hurtling towards them and Naruto blocked it and looked Sasuke in the eye and said, "This stupid coward is not the Sasuke I know," — for a moment, Sasuke felt that it might be true. For a moment, he thought himself equal to the fight. It might have been recklessness, or idiocy, or courage, but as Sasuke remembered his brother's mocking advice — _Run_ , his brother had said, as if that was all Sasuke was good for — Sasuke thought: _No_. No, he would not run. He would plant himself here like a tree, as tall and upright as the cypress, not to be moved.

Then the woman's tongue snaked out and wrapped around Naruto and lifted him five meters into the air.

Terror descended again. What was he doing? Was he considering _fighting_ this woman? This woman that moved like she had no joints, like she was barely human? This woman who had the height advantage, reach advantage, strength advantage, skill advantage? Meanwhile, Sasuke's inventory was: twenty-three kunai, a dozen explosive tags, a handful of fire jutsus, a couple months of Sharingan experience, and an hour and half ago, his first stabbing. The blood was still on his face.

How the fuck was he going to keep the three of them safe?

Sasuke didn't see what the woman did, how she threw Naruto away — with her _tongue_? It was like swatting a gnat. Naruto went flying back through the trees. Thankfully, Sakura reacted quickly and pinned Naruto to a tree before he fell the entire way down to the forest floor.

That decided it.

They were getting out of here.

Sakura was yelling at him — something about cowards — but Sasuke could not hear over the pounding in his head.

He took a step back. "Sakura," he croaked out.

The woman was retracting her tongue, the long wet length of it spooling back into her mouth. She looked at him, considering, speculative, _hungry_. A chill went down Sasuke's back. The rush of his own blood in his ears was deafening.

"Sakura," he called again, voice still not quite steady but louder at least. He took another step back, and then another. Then it was easier — he could move again. His limbs were his own. The cold fist of terror loosened around his throat. He yelled, "Run, Sakura!"

He ran, throwing explosive tags behind him at the snake and the snake-woman. The ensuing explosion and smoke provided some cover. Sasuke bounded through the tree branches until he came to where Naruto dangled. Pocketing Sakura's kunai, Sasuke slung Naruto over his shoulder, and without a glance backwards, got the hell out of there.


	2. Chapter 2

It took Sakura a moment to react. When she realized what Sasuke meant — to run _away_ — disbelief, astonishment, disappointment at what he was saying, at _him_ , made her distracted and clumsy. She slipped on a wet patch of moss and went tumbling down the tree. By the time she untangled her feet from the knotted tree roots, Sasuke had already disappeared into the deep forest.

He had left her behind.

Sakura gaped.

He had — Sasuke had —

Sakura cast a quavering look at the tree from which Naruto had been pinned. He was gone too.

It was just her, now.

Alone.

Shakily, Sakura backed away, keeping the snake-woman in eyesight. There was still time to run, surely. The snake-woman had taken their scroll already. What else could she want?

The snake-woman turned her gaze from the thick greenery in which Sasuke had disappeared. She looked at Sakura. Sakura felt that chilling paralysis again. She was suddenly and terribly aware of her own softness, the frail unprotected skin and flesh of her body.

"He ran," said the woman, in that strange sibilant voice of hers. She sounded surprised.

"Y-you have the scroll. It's yours. Let us go," said Sakura. A hot flush of embarrassment rushed through her. Just a moment ago, she had been pushing Sasuke to fight, calling him a coward — and now here she was, rolling over, baring her throat, giving up the scroll without the least attempt at resistance.

The snake-woman took a step toward Sakura.

It felt like all the blood in her veins had congealed into ice. Sakura thought wildly, _Sasuke, come back. I'm sorry. Come back. I was wrong._

Last time, when the snake-woman had thrown the kunai at them, he had carried her away. His hands had been trembling and so cold. Now, Sakura realized that he had been afraid. Now, she was afraid too. She had grown used to placing her safety on him, relying on the shield of his presence; but he wasn't here now, and the weight of her own life pressed on Sakura. She did not know how to carry it. Her knees trembled.

"Please," she said. She didn't realize she was crying until her vision blurred. "You have the scroll already — "

The snake-woman continued forward until she loomed over Sakura. "I confess, I am disappointed. I thought he would put up more of a fight. But he ran off. Who would have thought? Still —" reaching out a hand, placing it on Sakura's head, stroking Sakura's hair —"there's you."

All of the air vanished from Sakura's lungs. She didn't dare move. She didn't dare breathe. Terror clamped down on her like a vise.

"Yes," murmured the snake-woman. "There's still you." The hand in Sakura's hair turned into a fist, painful, tight. "Will he come back for you?"

The first blow, when it came, was almost a relief. All of her fear finally coalesced into something real. Sakura's head snapped back from the force of the punch. Pain burned across her cheek. The second blow knocked the breath out of her. Something warm and metallic seeped into Sakura's mouth. The third blow was just pain. After that, Sakura lost count. Everything hurt.

"Come now," said the snake-woman. Sakura could barely hear her over the sound of her own gasping. "Cry. Let him hear you."

She gripped Sakura's hair and _pulled_. Something red trickled down Sakura's forehead and blurred her vision. The scream tore its way out of Sakura's throat.

"Yes," said the snake-woman.

The blows came fast and thick after that.

"No— no—" Sakura did not know what she was protesting. Everything had gone red and meaningless; everything was pain. _Stop_ , she wanted to say. _Sasuke_ , she wanted to say. The snake-woman's knee came up and caught Sakura in the stomach. There was nothing but blood and bile and agony in her throat. She doubled over, choking, sobbing, and would have crumpled to the ground — but the snake-woman still had her by the hair.

It went on and on and on and on. Sakura did not know when the snake-woman finally let her drop to the ground. The beating had stopped but not the pain. Dimly, Sakura saw something pale, pink, littering the ground by the snake-woman's feet. _Oh_ , she thought murkily — but it did not matter. It did not matter. _I am going to die_ , thought Sakura. She had never been so certain of anything before.

The snake-woman looked around, anticipating. But the forest around them was still, only the cries of the cicada filling the air. After several moments, the snake-woman clicked her tongue in disappointment. She frowned down at Sakura, "Will he not come for you?"

 _Don't come_ , thought Sakura — but he hadn't. She was all alone.

The snake-woman lifted a foot and placed it on Sakura's left elbow. She pressed down, and the pine needles on the forest ground pricked against Sakura's arm. "What use are you, then?" asked the snake-woman, stepping down harder. Sakura sobbed, heaving, desperate, ugly sobs. _Crack_ went Sakura's arm. She screamed.

Then a blur descended from the tree branches above and crashed into the snake-woman.


	3. Chapter 3

When Sakura first met Rock Lee, she found him definitely a weirdo. Polite, but a weirdo. And yet, it was kind of brave of him to be so different — the hair, the outfit, the speech mannerisms — a little off-putting, but brave.

The next time Sakura met Rock Lee, he saved her life. Sakura stared up at the broad green expanse of his back, as he stood between her and the snake-woman. He was giving some kind of speech, very earnest and enthusiastic, but Sakura’s ears were clogged with blood and she could not hear clearly. Still: there he stood, between her and death.

Sakura took back every unkind thing she had ever thought about him.

Rock Lee was brave and incredibly skilled at taijutsu and not a match for the snake-woman. She seemed irritated by him, impatient in a way she had not been with Sasuke. She did not play with Lee, the way she had with Sasuke, like a big cat predator with its prey. She pounded Lee into the dirt.

But Lee kept staggering back to his feet. Sakura, blearily through a swollen-shut eye, watched as Lee again and again struggled to stand. She swallowed. What was she doing, still lying in the dust? What was she doing, while Lee fought her battle for her? She put out one hand and found the rough bark of the tree beside her.

Sakura half-climbed, half-crawled her way upright.

She kept her broken left arm cradled against her chest. With the other hand, she fumbled at her kunai pouch. She didn’t know what she intended to do, but she couldn’t stand idly by.

However, before she could formulate a plan, reinforcements in the form of Lee’s teammates arrived. The three of them were clearly used to fighting together. Sakura watched them tag-team the snake-woman, covering each other, trading weapons easily, seamless in their transitions. _Oh_ , she thought. So that was what a team looked like.

The snake-woman seemed more interested in the fight now. She brought out her snakes again, and then her tongue. She sent Lee flying headfirst into a tree trunk, buried Tenten neck deep in the dirt, and then she reached out and stroked Neji’s cheek. “A Hyuuga,” she sighed, with strange satisfaction. “Yes — you’ll do just as well. Beautiful.”

“What the _fuck_ ,” said Neji, the veins around his eyes protruding.

The snake-woman laughed, delightedly, “Yes, show me your bloodline limit. Show me your eyes!”

Perhaps Neji really was the genius that everyone proclaimed him to be. He kept pace with the snake-woman, even as her movements sped into a blur. Sakura could not follow their speed, but Neji blocked her blows as if he could see her every movement. After a while, Sakura realized: he could.

Eventually Tenten dug herself out of the dirt pit. Neji had the upper hand now, as Tenten went around and flanked the snake-woman —

And then — Sakura saw in horror — the snake-woman laughed and pulled her head from her shoulders, the long, long stretch of her neck undulating like a snake.


	4. Chapter 4

It took Sasuke a few minutes before he realized that Sakura was not following behind. By then, he was far out enough that he had no line of sight to where she might have gone. 

Sasuke clicked his tongue in annoyance. Their luck was absolute shit today. He considered the dead weight of Naruto, hanging limp and prone. There was nothing for it. He couldn’t bring a bright orange potato sack along on the search.

So Sasuke wasted some minutes finding a suitable place to stash his sack of potatoes. He came across a hollowed out tree truck, half-rotted through. Probably some animal’s den, figured Sasuke. It looked empty at the moment, so he stuffed Naruto inside. He dragged some branches over, and laid them over the opening of the hollow. Stepping back, Sasuke considered this crude camouflage. It would do for the moment. He turned to go, and came face to face with a pissed off boar.

Naruto was in the boar’s den, apparently.

Sasuke had been boar-hunting before — a long, long time ago, so long ago it felt like another lifetime — but that had been with his ANBU captain brother, and besides, Sasuke had been equipped with armor and arrows and a javelin, proper boar-hunting equipment. It was a different matter when all he had on hand were a limited number of throwing knives. The boar’s tusks were longer than his kunai. “Fuck,” said Sasuke softly. What cursed star was shining on him today?

So he had to waste another half hour dealing with the boar, which was the sort of thing no one ever prepared you for, wrestling wild feral hogs. He couldn’t even blame Kakashi. The tusks were sharper than they looked, and the boar got him a couple of times. There was blood everywhere — the pig grunting, squealing — and when it was over, Sasuke staggered away, up to his elbows in blood, exhausted down to his bones. He wanted to sit down. 

He didn’t have the time.

The boar couldn’t be left lying there, in case it attracted other predators, especially with Naruto lying unconscious only ten feet away. So Sasuke got out his shuriken wires, and trussed the pig up on the tree branches — which was another joyful adventure, hauling 180 pounds of hog up the tree.

Finally, he could go.

How much time had already passed? And still no sign of Sakura. It was strange. Sakura was slow, but not that slow; and besides, she wasn’t the type to wander off by herself. Unease settled like a block of ice in Sasuke’s chest. If she was still back there, with the snake-woman…

Sasuke ran faster.

When he arrived, the clearing looked like some giant rock had smashed through. Broken tree branches littered the ground. Some of the smaller trees listed sideways at an unnatural angle. The ground was torn up, kunai scattered everywhere. And Sakura —

“Sakura,” he called. His voice didn’t seem to be working quite right.

— Sakura looked like a giant rock had smashed her too. Sasuke took in the blood matting her hair, her swollen eye, the ginger way she cradled her arm, her split lip, the bruises starting to rise to the surface of her skin, all the cuts and scrapes, and the way she had obviously been _beaten_ —

“ _Who_ —” The words caught in his throat. He cast a furious eye at the other people around her: the green guy from earlier, who didn’t look to be in much better shape than Sakura; the Hyuuga, collapsed and gasping on the ground; their other teammate, holding the Hyuuga’s hand — “Who did this to you?”

A series of complicated expressions flickered over Sakura’s face, but she said, “No, no.” Sakura handed the wet towel she was holding to the other girl, and came to Sasuke’s side. “They saved me,” she told him quietly. She cast a look over her shoulder. “Lee did.”

Sasuke looked at Lee, and then back at Sakura. It felt like there were a million things he wanted to say, but the words did not come. Sakura met his gaze, and there was that complicated expression again. He didn’t know what she meant by it. After a moment, Sasuke pressed his lips together and breathed out through his nose. The most pressing thing first, he decided. No need to air their dirty laundry in front of other people. “Where are you hurt?” he asked.

“My arm’s broken, I think,” she said. She tilted her head toward the others. “Let me go thank them, and then I’ll tell you what happened.”

She turned to go. Sasuke reached out and grabbed her elbow. “Wait,” he said. He pulled out his food rations and basic medical kit, and offered them to her. She had only one good hand, though, so he held onto the things and went over with her. These people had saved her. It was a debt she owed them, so it was a debt he owed them as well.


	5. Chapter 5

Tenten was clearly distracted, and Neji was — well, none of them knew what was happening to Neji — so Sakura made her farewells mostly to Lee. “Thank you,” she told him. He looked at her, with those big round eyes of his. They were not beautiful eyes, in the same way that Lee was not a handsome guy; but they were bright and clear and honest, like their owner, and Sakura was unspeakably grateful. “You saved my life,” she said. “I owe you.”

“No, Sakura,” Lee replied, very polite. “I told you before: I’ll protect you with my life.”

Sakura didn’t have an answer to that. It was not something she could answer. She smiled helplessly.

Lee’s gaze turned to Sasuke. “That woman was a fearsome enemy.” He paused. His mouth worked for a moment, like he was figuring out his next words. Eventually, he said, “Sakura shouldn’t have to face an enemy like that alone.”

Sasuke went cold: his eyes, his expression. Sakura could feel the chill emanating from him. This was how Sasuke got angry, she knew — and any moment now, he’d glare and say, _That’s none of your business_ , or _Who do you think you are, to lecture me?_ or, worse, he’d say nothing at all and stalk away.

But somehow Sasuke held it in. He returned Lee’s look for a few moments, and then he passed the rations and med kit over. He said, “We owe you.”

That surprised her.

They said their goodbyes, and Lee went back to his teammates. Sakura and Sasuke headed out of the clearing.

When they were comfortably out of ear range, Sakura turned to Sasuke. _You left me behind_ warred with _You came back for me_. She couldn’t settle on one. So she asked instead, “Where’s Naruto?”

Sasuke sent her an unhappy, complicated look. “Sit down,” he said. He broke a branch off a nearby spruce tree, then came over and sat down next to her. “I hid him in a boar’s den. I’ll tell you later. What happened?”

So Sakura told him: how she had tripped, how the snake-woman attacked her, how Lee and his teammates showed up. Sasuke listened with a furrowed brow, while he used a kunai to strip the spruce branch clean of leaves and twigs.

“— and then she — she bit Neji in the neck.”

Sasuke glanced up. “What does that mean?”

Sakura watched him peel the bark off the spruce branch. She had no idea what he was doing. “Just — she bit him. Her neck stretched out like, twenty feet. She bit him, with her teeth.”

“…Venom?” asked Sasuke.

His guess was as good as hers. Sakura had never heard of any cases of _human venom_ , but then again, she had never heard of anyone distending their neck twenty feet. “There was a weird mark on his neck where she bit him. Then she said a bunch of weird stuff about how he would seek her out, and how she would welcome him, and it was just super creepy.”

“This fucking day,” said Sasuke under his breath. He held out the spruce branch for inspection. The pale wood gleamed in the darkening light. He took off one of his arm protectors, and rolled it up into a wad, and handed it to Sakura.

She took it, confused.

“Where’s the break in your arm?”

“Just below the elbow.” Sakura leaned back, guarded. “Why?”

“I’m going to splint it,” he answered. He leaned down and started unravelling the extra bandages he carried around his shins. When she didn’t move, he glanced up. He must have seen her fear, because the unhappy, complicated expression came back. The corners of his mouth pulled down. But he told her, “We have to. You can’t move around like this.”

Protests rose to Sakura’s lips. Had he done this before? Did he know what he was doing? Sakura clamped her teeth down on those questions. He was right. She knew that he was right. She couldn’t move around with an unsplinted broken arm, and they had to move. She couldn’t be left behind again.

“All right,” she said. She put the rolled up wad of cloth in her mouth and bit down on it.

Sasuke came over, branch in one hand and bandages in the other. When Sakura looked up, he was pale around the mouth. Still, his hands were steady and he didn’t hesitate. It didn’t take long. He braced her arm against her chest, jarring her. Cold sweat broke out on her forehead. Sasuke secured the branch against her arm, tying the bandages tight. Then he checked her wrist pulse and her fingertips for circulation. He loosened the wrist bandage slightly. He sat back.

“All right,” said Sasuke, sounding relieved.

He took off his other arm protector and ripped it along the seam, then knotted it in one corner, fashioning a makeshift sling. When he tied the other two ends together behind her neck, Sakura felt some of the tension go out of her shoulder. Experimentally, she turned her torso one way, then the other.

“Go easy,” said Sasuke.

Sakura took the cloth bite out of her mouth. It was damp, so she didn’t give it back to him. “It’s good,” she told him. “Thank you.”

He nodded.

They were quiet for a long moment. The sun was setting, and darkness settled around them gently. The shadows stretched out long and languorous. A frog croaked in the distance.

“Sasuke,” said Sakura. An ache welled up in her throat: something like grievance, something like sorrow. “Lee and his team — they’re really good. At teamwork, I mean. I watched them fight and they… they’re really good together. They know what they’re doing and what each other are doing.”

Sasuke looked at her, quiet.

“Sasuke,” she said again. This time, she couldn’t help the quavering in her voice. “Do you think, one day…Do you think we can be like that? One day, can we fight together like that?” The tears welled up, hot and stinging, and no matter how she swallowed, they didn’t go back down.

“Stop crying,” said Sasuke, roughly.

“I’m trying,” hiccuped Sakura. It was no use. The tears welled up as fast as she could blink them away. They stung the broken skin around her eyes.

“Hey, hey,” said Sasuke. He reached a hand out, as if to touch her face — but stopped midair. He looked at the dirt and blood on his fingers, the tree bark pieces under his fingernails. He dropped his hand. “You’re going to get your wounds infected. Don’t cry. Doesn’t it hurt? Sakura, don’t cry.”

That opened the floodgates. She had never heard him speak like that to her before. As if he were worried. After all the pain and suffering of the day, that little bit of concern from someone she wanted concern from — Sakura bawled.

“Sasuke,” she sobbed.

Helpless and at a loss, he patted her shoulder.

“Why did you — leave me there?” she cried. Then, in the same ragged breath, “Why did you come back?”

“I didn’t notice.” He seemed to realize how inadequate an answer that was. “I’m sorry.”

“I was — ” her breath hitched — “I was so scared. I thought I was going to die. I was so scared.”

He looked at her with those dark eyes of his, as dark as the shadows around them. “Yeah,” said Sasuke. His hand on her shoulder slowed, gently patting, like consoling a small child. 

Her tears went pitter-pattering down. They fell into the dirt beneath her, little dark splotches.

“And I’m a terrible person!” she blubbered. “Even though they saved m-me, all I could think — when I saw that snake-woman biting him — At least it wasn’t Sasuke! At least it wasn’t Sasuke being bitten! You didn’t see Neji when h-he — when he got bitten, he was — he was in so much pain. It did something _horrible_ to him.”

She reached out with her good hand, and fumblingly, caught his.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Sasuke looked at her. One of her eyes was swollen shut, and the other was red from crying, eyelashes clumping wetly together. Her nose was running. But her voice was clear and certain. “I’m sorry,” she said, vehement, “for what I said. You were right. We couldn’t have fought that person. We were no match for her. I shouldn’t have called you a —”

“All right, all right,” he interrupted. He pulled his hand back. “I didn’t hear what you said, anyway. Stop crying now. Are you done? Where’s your med kit?”

She handed it to him.

Sasuke was not especially practiced in medical care. Like most other boys his age, he didn’t pay attention to the host of bumps and scrapes that genin collected in the normal course of a day. He didn’t know how to be gentle. The most that could be said of him as he patched her up was that his hands were steady.

But Sakura wouldn’t have traded him for anyone else, in that moment.


	6. Chapter 6

Afterwards, they both just sat there in the dark, unmoving.

Fireflies came out. The little flickers of light drifted around, winking coyly. Sakura stared at them stupidly. She was all cried out. A bone-deep tiredness settled over her now. What a long day it had been. And it was only the first.

After a while, she remembered, “Naruto.”

It took Sasuke a moment to react. He seemed tired too. “Oh. Right,” he said. He put his hands on his knees and slowly levered himself upright. He was moving like an old man, slow and creaky. Sakura saw him wince.

She frowned and stood up too. “Are you hurt?”

He pointed in a direction. They set off, making their way through the forest undergrowth. “I got gored, a little,” he told her. “Earlier. The boar den.”

Incredulously, Sakura listened to him explain what he had been up to while she had been getting her face beaten in. “You fought a _boar_? It _gored_ you? Where? Did you patch it up?”

“Yeah,” he said, like that was the end of it, but Saskura fussed until he showed her. Sasuke lifted the bottom of his shirt. There were purple bruises all down his right side, and he had fixed gauze dressing just a little below his ribs. She hissed. “It’s fine,” he told her, letting his shirt fall again.

Sasuke had a very strange definition of _fine_ , decided Sakura.

Naruto was still in the tree trunk where Sasuke had left him. Sasuke cleared away the branches and bramble surrounding the opening. They sat down. Sakura dug out her food rations. She handed half to Sasuke.

“We’ll camp here for the night,” decided Sasuke, taking the food.

Sakura nodded.

They ate in silence. In the distance, an owl hooted. Something rustled in the green undergrowth nearby. Sakura jerked, but Sasuke told her, “Rabbits.”

When she looked over, she caught the glimpse of a low red glimmer. Then he blinked and it was gone. But she knew now that he was uneasy too: the sound had startled him, because his nerves were worn thin, because he was tired. Because this was his first chuunin exam too.

But he was doing his best. He was trying to keep them together. He had carried Naruto away from danger and he had fought a boar and he had come back for her and treated her injuries. Sakura felt sudden, sinking remorse at the thought of him applying dressing and bandages to his own ribs, grimacing silently to himself. There had been no one to help him. He had borne it all alone.

Sakura clenched her fist.

There had to be something she could do.

The moon hung low over the treetops. The night was still young. “Sasuke,” she said. “What should we do next?”

He looked up at her.

What could they do? They were down a teammate and had no scroll and were both injured. It had not been a promising first day.

“Normally,” reasoned Sakura, “if you lose your scroll, you’d head for the tower. Because everyone has to go there — so if you want to take another team’s scrolls, the chances of finding a team with scrolls are higher there.”

Sasuke nodded.

Sakura thought for a little bit. “But that also means that it’s a small area with a lot of teams who have already lost both scrolls. So it’s more competition. And we’re … ” She looked down at her arm, and then at Naruto, lying there unmoving.

“Not at a fighting advantage,” agreed Sasuke. Sakura looked at him, surprised. The Sasuke she knew from the Academy would never have admitted to being at a disadvantage in anything.

But then the memory of that snake-woman came to her. Perhaps they had both had fear beaten into them today.

Sakura was not a strong fighter. That wasn’t something she could change today or tomorrow or this week. She was Sasuke’s fighting disadvantage — he had to cover for her. But she had her own strengths, she thought. She tried to frame their situation as an Academy tactics problem.

“All warfare is based on deception,” she recited. That was a basic tenet. First year stuff.

Sasuke waited, picking idly at a clump of grass.

“What we lack in manpower, we have to make up for in terrain advantage.” Sakura frowned. “ _Lure the tiger off its mountain lair_. If we can put other teams in a positional disadvantage, we might be able to gain the upper hand… We have to make them come to us. We make a trap and bait it.”

Sasuke considered this. They had no scrolls and their supplies were low. “With what bait?”

That was the crucial question. “If I were a team with two scrolls already,” Sakura mused, “I would be worried about … injuries? Medical supplies. Keeping my strength up until the end of the competition. Access to water. Access to food. Food —” She leaned forward and grabbed Sasuke’s hand. “Food!”

He blinked at her. “What?”

Sakura smiled at him. “Sasuke,” she said, and looked up. He followed her gaze, up through the tree branches, up at the trussed-up boar above their heads.


	7. Chapter 7

“Tomorrow,” said Sasuke. It was late. Sakura was visibly flagging, and he was tired too. There was a lot to prepare, and if things went well, they had to expect fighting tomorrow. Best they both get a good night’s rest. “I’ll take the first watch.”

Sakura looked like she was about to protest, then thought better of it. She only said, “Wake me up later. I’ll take the second watch.”

 _Of course_ , figured Sasuke. Who else? Naruto was still out, so there were only the two of them to stand guard.

Then there was the matter of getting ready for sleep. Sakura stood looking hesitantly into the bushes, then looking back at Sasuke, then back at the bushes. After a few rounds of this, Sasuke understood. She was afraid to go out of his sight, but there were some things that she couldn’t do in front of him.

Before, he might have called her ridiculous; what an idiotic thing to be afraid of. But he had no leg to stand on now, when it came to fear. He had been the first to run. He was the biggest coward of them all.

And besides, thought Sasuke, she had reason to be afraid.

He went over and handed her one of his wired shuriken. “Take it with you,” he said. “Pull twice when you stop. If it loosens, or if it pulls again, I’ll come looking for you.”

Sakura stared down at the shuriken and at the connecting wire and at the end of the wire that Sasuke still kept in hand. She blinked rapidly. With relief, Sasuke saw the tears being forced back. “Thanks,” she said, in a nasal voice, and turning, waded into the bushes.

Sasuke sat down and watched the wire unspool through his fingers. Eventually, he felt two sharp tugs, so he held tight. But nothing happened, and after a while, Sakura came safely back.

She fell asleep quickly. Sasuke sat listening to the slow even rhythm of her breathing. He leaned back against the tree, its rough bark sturdy and comforting against his back. The moon was high in the sky, full and round, trailing misty silver clouds.

There had been a full moon that night too, thought Sasuke. Bright and round, shining down on him as he walked home. And he’d reached home, and opened the door, and seen what was waiting for him. And he had run.

Just like today. He had run away.

Perhaps his brother was right. Perhaps running _was_ all that he was good for: running and running, clinging to his ugly life, like a dog. Like a worm.

Even Sakura, in that moment, had called him — a _coward_.

Him, an Uchiha. A coward. What a disgrace. What a shame he was to the family. Sasuke leaned forward and buried his face in his hands. He wasn’t seven years old anymore. He was taller now, and faster, and stronger. His aim with kunai was better, and his fires were larger and hotter. So why was it that his heart remained so weak, so cowering? Why had his courage not improved with time? Why had he run?

How would he ever kill his brother?

The night had no answers.

After a while, Sasuke sat up. He scrubbed a rough hand over his eyes and got to his feet. There wasn’t time for this. He had to get ready for tomorrow.


	8. Chapter 8

Sakura was shaken awake only two minutes after she closed her eyes, but when she blearily sat up, she saw the pale underbelly of dawn lightening the eastern edge of sky. She had slept through the night. Sasuke crouched down next to her in the dim light. Beside him was a pile of sharpened wooden stakes. He had been busy during the night. “Wake me up in three hours,” he said.

Sakura shuffled out of the tree trunk and stood for a while in the chilly morning. The birds were still quiet, this time of day, and dew dotted the soft grass underfoot. A breeze passed by, carrying on it the scent of pine and spruce.

She ducked back inside the tree hollow. Sasuke was already fast asleep, and Naruto was still unconscious. Sakura set to sorting through her weapons pouch, picking out the explosives and illusion scrolls that they could use for traps.

When it got close to the three hours Sasuke had set for himself, Sakura reached over and nudged him gently on the shoulder. His eyes opened. It was uncanny: Sasuke didn’t have a process to waking up, didn’t take any time transitioning from sleeping to half-asleep to mostly awake; he just became awake the next second. What kind of discipline was that, Sakura wondered, half-envious.

They went outside and took a surveying loop of their surroundings, and then sat down to hash out the details of their traps. Their position was good, and Sakura felt some stirrings of optimism as she sketched out her plans in the dirt with a stick. Sasuke alternately frowned and nodded, and occasionally reached over to alter her drawings, but they came to a consensus pretty quickly.

Then it was time for the hog. Sakura watched Sasuke climb the tree. His arms straining, face flushed, he hoisted the pig on his back and made his way slowly back down the tree. Sakura eyed Sasuke’s arms. The pig was bigger than he was and he had lifted it. Sharply, she felt the physical disparity between them. He was much, much stronger than her. Sakura rubbed her own upper arm. Maybe she should take up weight training.

The pig had started to attract flies after being left in the summer heat overnight. Sakura swatted at the things buzzing around them and wrinkled her nose. “Do you know how to butcher a pig?” she asked Sasuke.

He shook his head.

“Me neither,” admitted Sakura.

Sasuke blew out a breath. “How hard can it be?” he said, but his tone said, _Fuck this fuck this fuck this fuck_. He took out his kunai and approached the pig.

When his hand hovered over the pig’s stomach, Sakura asked, “But should we try to avoid rupturing the intestines? It’s probably full of … really gross stuff.”

Sasuke paused. His hand moved a little lower, to the rear leg of the pig. Sakura made a face and said, “I don’t know where the pig bladder is located. But we probably don’t want to rupture that either?”

Sasuke decided not to risk it. He went around the pig and set his kunai to the shoulder haunch of the pig’s foreleg. He looked up at Sakura, eyes questioning.

Sakura said, “I guess? Go for it.”

Sasuke forced the kunai in. It was a messy affair. After a while, Sakura quietly went into the bushes and threw up. She wiped her mouth, then came back and helped Sasuke hold the leg at an angle while he sawed through the ligaments.

“There’s one that wraps around, it’s a ball joint so — yeah, a little further down.” Sakura did her best to remember the anatomy classes from the Academy. Sasuke’s hands and forearms were all streaked in blood, and he had a smudge on his cheek. Sweat dripped down his brow. But he followed her instructions patiently. After a bit, they severed the foreleg.

Sasuke trundled the pig back up the tree, where it could smell and attract flies a safe distance away. Sakura went into the bushes to puke again. Nothing came up this time, just some sour bile. When she returned, Sasuke had skinned the pork leg and was standing there, regarding his blood-streaked arms with distaste.

Their water and bandages were both in short supply, so Sakura gathered some young tree leaves and used that to help Sasuke scrub the worst of the blood off. It didn’t help much, but Sasuke only sighed and stretched out his shoulders. Then he went off to set traps, while Sakura looked for firewood and kindling.

She found some wild scallions too, so she plucked those as well. When Sasuke came back, he lit the fire, and with some wooden stakes and wire, they managed to get the pork leg on a spit over the fire. Sakura tied the scallions into a knot and stuck the knot under a flap of fat.

Now, they could sit and rest a little. Sakura used a big magnolia leaf to gently fan the fire. Sasuke sat cross-legged next to her and occasionally reached over to turn the spit. The fat on the pork began to soften. Drops of it splashed down, sputtering and hissing on the firewood. Slowly the oil started to cook the scallion knot, and the smell of oil and green onions and sizzling pork began to waft in the air.

“Oh, that smells … really good,” said Sakura in some surprise.

“Mm,” said Sasuke.

“I kind of want some now.”

He glanced over. “Don’t. It’s probably gone bad. And there’s maggots in there.”

That was disgusting.

The sun overhead rose high in the sky, beating down at them. The smell of cooking meat grew more intense. Sakura swallowed, and after some consideration, said, “But the maggots would be cooked too, right? They’d be edible.”

Sasuke sent her a sideways look. The judgment in that look was obvious.

“I’m going to an all-you-can-eat yakiniku first thing after we finish this exam,” grumbled Sakura. “I’m not even going to go home. I’m going straight to yakiniku. I’m going to get pork belly, and beef tongue, and short ribs. And I’m going to get the biggest tallest glass of iced lemonade they have.”

The smoke from their fire rose high in the air, a tall gray tower against the bright blue sky. Around them, cicadas were buzzing again.

Sasuke said, “I’m taking a bath.”

Sakura paused. She looked at him. He meant … when they finished the exam.

“Oh, yeah, that sounds great,” she enthused. “First a scrub-down in the shower, and then a nice long soak. And then a bottle of fruit milk when you come out.”

“Fruit milk.” There was that judging look again.

“Fruit milk is great,” she protested. “Strawberry’s probably the classic, but you know, banana is also —”

A crash interrupted her.

Sasuke stood up. “The traps,” he said, and not waiting for Sakura to reply or follow, he disappeared into the bushes.


	9. Chapter 9

Sakura hesitated, not sure whether she should follow Sasuke or whether she should stay to keep an eye on the pork. Then the ridiculousness of prioritizing pig over Sasuke hit her. She waded after Sasuke into the bushes.

Finding him crouched behind a thicket, Sakura squatted down next to him. Two Cloud shinobi had been caught, one lying in a ditch, one dangling by his ankle from a rope on a tree branch. They were talking to each other. Sakura couldn’t hear what they were saying.

Sasuke stood up.

“Wait,” hissed Sakura. “There’s only two of them. Where’s the third one?”

“Haven’t seen ‘em,” said Sasuke absently. He adjusted his headband. “I’ll be quick.”

“But —”

He jumped out of the thicket. Kunai in hand, he went barreling toward the two captives. It was over quickly. The Cloud-nin were encumbered by the traps, and Sasuke was excellent at hand to hand combat. He left them in the traps.

“You’re not going to release them?” asked Sakura when he rejoined her.

“No reason to give them a chance to follow us.”

Sakura looked at the scroll in his hand. Her emotions were a tangled mess. Relief, that they had regained a scroll. Gratitude, that Sasuke had handled the fight so easily. Unease, that he kept leaving her behind, disappearing without a word. He hadn’t even waited for her to finish speaking this time.

Ruminating on this cocktail of feelings, Sakura followed Sasuke back to their little camp.

He sat down next to the fire again and turned the pork on its spit. Sakura picked up the magnolia leaf and listlessly began to fan. She said, “Sasuke.”

He glanced at her.

“Can you … ” Sakura frowned. This was not a good phrasing. She started over. “Next time, let’s go together.” Sakura chewed on her words. “I mean, when something comes up, I can help — ”

A yell echoed into their clearing. Sasuke looked in the direction of the yell and stood. “Another one already.”

Sakura sighed in resignation as he went off again. She followed after him into the woods. What she was asking for wasn’t so outrageous, surely? She just wanted them to be a team. Shouldn’t he let her know what he was doing? Where he was going? Otherwise, how could she cooperate? She wasn’t even asking for some elaborate farewell. She just wanted a _Wait here_ , or — better than that — _Come on._

When she found him this time, standing still behind a tree, a surprise was waiting for her.

“Oh,” whispered Sakura, coming to a halt. A little distance away, Ino and Shikamaru were busy trying to pull Chouji out of quicksand. Chouji was in the sandpit up to his knees and still sinking.

“Ugh, you —! You fatso!” Shikamaru had Chouji by one arm. He was red faced from the effort of pulling. “I told you! There’s nothing good this way! There’s no way anyone’s cooking pork belly! There’s no barbeque house in these damned woods!”

“I’m just big-boned, you weakling! Pull harder!”

“Just shut up, both of you!” Ino, pulling Chouji’s other arm, gritted out.

Rather than Shikamaru and Ino pulling Chouji out, it looked more like Chouji was slowly dragging Shikamaru and Ino into the quicksand.

“Rope, rope, rope!” barked Shikamaru. “Ino, where’s the rope? Chouji, stop moving!”

Watching them, Sakura instinctively stepped forward to lend a hand. Sasuke’s touch on her shoulder stopped her.

“They have a scroll,” said Sasuke.

Sakura looked at him, and then at Team 10, and back at Sasuke. _But Ino is my friend_ , rose to Sakura’s lips. She swallowed it back down. This was a competition, and they could not be swayed by personal feelings. _But Lee saved me_ , she thought. Sakura couldn’t entirely harden her heart: not when she was alive because of the soft heart of another.

Sasuke ran out of patience for Sakura’s internal struggle. He pushed her back behind the tree, then turned, pulling out his kunai.

Sasuke came at Team 10 like a blur, ramming into Shikamaru. “What the fuck!” yelled Ino. Shikamaru lost his grip on Chouji and went tumbling into the dirt.

Ino gave up her grip on Chouji as well and grabbed her weapons. She blocked Sasuke’s first blow and then faltered. “Sasuke?”

“Wait, what about me? You’re abandoning me?” shouted Chouji.

“I’m busy! You’re not sinking that fast anyway!” Ino yelled back. She was being forced back, step by step, toward the quicksand as she tried to keep her weapons pouch away from Sasuke’s reaching hand. Soon, she’d have to give up the scroll, or else join Chouji in the sandpit.

Behind them, Shikamaru slowly regained his feet. Sakura realized what he meant to do a second too late: before she could shout, his fingers flew through the hand seals. Shikamaru’s shadow unfurled out, a long sinuous line, stretching into Sasuke’s shadow.

Sasuke froze.

Ino staggered back, breathing heavily.

A white noise filled Sakura’s head. It wasn’t quite panic: she felt cold, and afraid, and also very clear what she had to do. Sasuke was stuck. She had to help him. Ino was her friend — but Sasuke was her teammate. 

She ran forward. Fumbling in her weapons pouch, she called out, “Sasuke! Close your eyes!” She pulled out a flashbang scroll, bit her thumb, and pressed the blood into the scroll.

Light exploded.

Sakura’s vision whited out. But she heard footsteps and knew that the shadows must have dissipated. Sasuke could move now.

When her sight cleared, she saw that Sasuke had wrestled Shikamaru to the ground. Sasuke was binding Shikamaru’s hands behind his back, immobilizing him. To one side, Ino was blinking like her vision had just cleared too. She looked at her one teammate stuck in the sandpit, and at her other teammate being tied up. Ino frowned. She met Sakura’s gaze.

It felt like an icy flick to the forehead.

Sakura’s mouth said, “Sasuke.”

Sasuke turned to look at her.

Sakura saw her own hand hold up a kunai. In horror, she watched as the kunai approached her neck. She couldn’t stop her hand. Her body was not responding. She was like a puppet, being made to move by someone else.

Sasuke took a step forward. “Sakura,” he said, in a bewildered voice.

Sakura tried to indicate that it wasn’t her! She tried to shake her head, to widen her eyes, anything to tell him to stay away.

Perhaps something showed in her expression, or perhaps Sasuke was by nature a suspicious person. He slanted a look to the side, to where Ino was slumped on the ground.

“Ha, get it now? I’m taking over for Forehead for a little bit, but don’t —” Sakura’s voice broke off. Her hand holding the kunai trembled. Her arm tried to lift higher, to bring the kunai flush to her neck, but her arm seemed stuck. “Huh?” Her elbow couldn’t lift higher than mid-chest. Her foot moved a step back. Sakura’s mouth made a hissing sound.

The next moment was like breaking through the surface of a cold lake. Sakura took a deep gasp.

Ino sat up, coughing. “What is — ” She wiped the corner of her mouth. “What is wrong with you, Forehead? I thought I was going to pass out. Why does everything hurt? What the fuck happened to you?” Ino stumbled to her feed. “Chouji! Give me your pack! Where’s your medicine pouch?”

“I’m literally still sinking here,” said Chouji. But Shikamaru and Chouji had both grown up being bullied into obedience by Ino. He tossed her his pouch. “It’s the blue one.”

Ino came over to Sakura with the bulky pack. “You look like shit,” she told Sakura frankly. “And you feel like a giant walking bruise.”

“I _am_ a giant walking bruise,” admitted Sakura. She regarded Ino warily.

“Time out, time out,” said Ino. She called to Sasuke, “Time out, okay?”

Sasuke didn’t look happy about it, but he caught Sakura’s eye, and when Sakura nodded, he sat down next to Shikamaru on the ground.

“Did you walk into a meat grinder or something?” Ino crouched down and poked Sakura’s ankle. “Do you know that this ankle is sprained? Why didn’t you bind it? Did you not feel anything, you freak?”

Everything more or less hurt. An ankle sprain had been a small thing, compared to some of Sakura’s other injuries.

Ino was still chattering away. “I hate pain. I hate possessing people who are in pain. It makes me paranoid about what’s happening to my own body. But seriously, there’s something wrong with your pain tolerance, Forehead — I don’t know how you’re still walking. For real, I was going to pass out. I mean it. Here, sit down, take off your shoe.”

Ino dug out a small jar from the blue pouch. She opened it and applied some of the cream to Sakura’s ankle. Then she wrapped a bandage around Sakura’s ankle, inexpertly. The bandage started to unravel even before Ino tied it off. 

“Oh—! For fuck’s sake. You wrap it. I never know how to do compression dressings.”

Sakura took over. The sudden truce unsettled her. Ino’s kindness, as always, was abrupt and startling and made Sakura want to cry. She said, after a moment, “Tell Chouji to stop moving. He’s just tiring himself out. Sand’s denser than people. He won’t drown.”

“Nerd,” said Ino. She shouted over her shoulder, “Stop flailing, you idiot! We’ll get you out in a minute, you’re not going to die.” She turned back to Sakura. Her eyes took on a calculating gleam. “Hey,” she said.

Sakura knew that tone. That honeyed-sweet, wheedling tone. Nothing good ever came from that tone.

“Look, this is like a favor, yeah? I’m doing you a favor. Who knows what permanent injury you might do to yourself if you keep walking around on that foot like that! So do me a favor too. Let us go. Yeah? Then we’ll call it even.”

Sakura leveled an unimpressed look at Ino. “Pig,” she said, “you can’t weasel your way out of a loss by calling timeout.”

“Why not!” huffed Ino.

Sakura put her shoe back on. She stood and offered a hand to Ino. Ino took it. “How about this,” said Sakura. There was no way she could let Team 10 just walk away. Sasuke would kill her. But Sakura looked at Ino’s clothes (clean), Ino’s hair (neat), Ino’s supplies (full) — and had a pretty good sense of just how little fighting Team 10 had been doing. Maybe they could help each other out. 

“You give me a fish,” offered Sakura, “and I’ll teach you how to fish.”


	10. Chapter 10

Sasuke looked at the two scrolls in his hands. Sitting next to him in the shade of the tree, Sakura plucked at the wildflowers, idly making daisy chains. Some distance away from them, Team 10 were gathered around the boar. Chouji had pulled packets of salt and also a cleaver from his apparently bottomless pack, and Team 10 was in the process of making salt pork.

“I don’t understand,” admitted Sasuke. He didn’t like saying the words, but curiosity got the better of him. Besides, this was Sakura. He had the vague notion that it would take a lot for Sakura to laugh at him. “We could have just fought them for the scroll.”

“Isn’t it better to get what you want without fighting?” asked Sakura, bent over a lapful of wildflowers. It looked to be difficult, making flower chains one-handed. She kept at it.

“Is it?” Sasuke frowned. Wasn’t the whole point to prove themselves by combat? What was strength but victory on the battlefield?

“Well — that unit we had on strategic attacks.” Sakura looked up from her flowers to squint into the forest undergrowth. She dredged up the memory: “ _Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting._ ”

Sasuke remembered it vaguely — from year three at the Academy. Amazing that she could still recite it like that.

Sakura returned to her flowers. “Because the outcome of fights are never guaranteed. Accidents happen.” She plucked at a daisy, trimming the leaves off. “So the low-risk approach of negotiations is preferred over the high-risk approach of combat.”

Sasuke cast her a doubtful look.

“We might have won,” explained Sakura, “but it would have cost us something. It’s tiring to fight, isn’t it? There’s also the risk of injury, and the risk of losing, and what would we do if the fight came to a stalemate? What if you got really hurt? There are so many what-ifs. Why risk it?”

Sasuke sat quietly, turning it over in his head. Her reluctance to fight could be understood: she was so bad at it, after all. But, Sasuke thought, even if the outcome of fights were never guaranteed, some fights had fairly foregone conclusions. He did not think he was in danger of too many _what-if_ s from a team like Team 10. He was confident in his abilities there.

He was so confident, in fact, that he hardly felt the need to prove it. Sasuke supposed that was what Sakura meant. Why go to the effort of actual combat when the outcome was already apparent? She had a point there. In a situation like this, in the Forest of Death, their energy resources should be conserved as much as possible. Sasuke thought approvingly of her foresight.

Meanwhile, Sakura braided three more daisies into her flower chain. She held it up for his inspection, beaming.

She was a sight: the bruises on her face had deepened overnight, blue and green and purple blooming across her skin. Her eye was swollen, and her split lip had scabbed over, and some of her hair had been ripped out. She looked terrible. Sasuke hurt just looking at her.

And yet, the sight of her, smiling the best she could around that split lip, bright eyed and cheerful in the summer sunshine — it was funny, somehow. Heart-lightening. For the first time in two days, Sasuke felt his shoulders ease. He smiled and told her, “Wear it yourself.”

Obediently, Sakura put the daisy chain in her own hair.

Sasuke looked at it drooping crookedly over her forehead. A question still lingered. “Why did they agree to give their scroll? Why didn’t _they_ fight?”

“Oh, they’re a bunch of scaredy-cats.” Sakura gestured with her chin. “See how clean their clothes are? They haven’t been in a fight since we came into this forest. Ino talks a big game, but she’s actually super careful, you know? And Shikamaru is lazy and Chouji is laid-back, so they both listen to her. I bet you anything they’ve been hiding and avoiding fights this whole time.”

Sasuke didn’t know enough about Team 10 to know if this assessment of their characters was accurate or not. It had been easier in the Academy to not bother with any of his classmates. They didn’t have anything to do with him. 

But now the thought came to Sasuke that this was not quite true. Sakura had been a classmate, and she had set off a light-flash bomb for him; Naruto had been a classmate, and was currently a dead weight in the most literal sense of the word; Team 10 had all been his classmates. In the future, his other Academy classmates might similarly become allies or hindrances or enemies. What they were like did have something to do with him.

“Okay,” he said.

Sakura went on, “Well, what were they hoping to do? Stumble on a weaker team with a matching scroll? The chances of that goes down the longer this competition continues. They’re like us, but _worse_. So I said to Ino, I’ll show her how to get more scrolls. Ino’s not stupid. If you’re able to get more scrolls, then what’s hard about giving up one scroll for now?”

Sasuke was starting to understand the pattern of her thoughts now. He asked, a little amused, “Which stratagem is this?”

“Enemy dealing stratagems.” Sakura gave him a small sideways smile, almost embarrassed. “Number eleven: _Sacrifice the plum tree to preserve the peach tree_.”

Sasuke swallowed a laugh. Leaning back, he said, “I get it. They weren’t likely to win in combat — so rather than just lose a scroll, they traded for this positional advantage with the traps and the boar. Since everyone’s worried about food, boar is a good lure.”

“Well, it caught them, at least,” said Sakura wryly.

Sasuke looked at Chouji wielding the cleaver. He was perplexingly good at it. “Is his family in the butchering business?”

Sakura didn’t know either. “He looks kind of cool, doesn’t he?” But she said after a moment, “Sasuke is cooler though. I don’t know anyone else who would wrestle a boar. I’d run, definitely.”

“They’re fast,” he told her seriously. “If you come across a boar, do not run. Climb a tree. Don’t run.”

After Team 10 finished butchering the hog, Shikamaru wanted to see the traps that Sasuke had previously set, so Sasuke took him out for a survey. When they came back, Chouji was smoking the salted pork. Ino was sitting next to Sakura, applying more medicine to Sakura’s cuts and bruises. As Sasuke drew near, he faintly overheard, “You shameless hussy,” and “That’s loser talk, you loser. Don’t be so sour.”

They caught sight of him.

“Ah,” said Ino, stopping short.

“… Well!” Sakura stood up. “Are you finished? About time we get going then!”

“Stay for lunch,” said Ino, but they declined. Sasuke remembered the flies from that morning, and judging by Sakura’s queasy smile, she was thinking the same thing.

He hefted Naruto onto his shoulder, Sakura said their goodbyes, and they set out for the tower.


	11. Chapter 11

It was a long distance to the tower. When the sun climbed high in the sky, they stopped to rest in the shade and avoid the worst of the midday heat. 

Naruto still had not woken up. Worried, Sakura crouched down over him. She checked his temperature and pulse but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. His breaths were even and steady, his pulse strong and good. Sakura didn’t know what else to look for.

Sasuke watched quietly. When Sakura sat back, frowning, he took his water canteen and stood up.

Sakura had learned her lesson from the morning. She hastily caught the hem of his shirt even as Sasuke turned to leave. “Where are you going?”

He glanced at her. “Don’t you hear it?”

Sakura listened carefully. From a distance came the faint sound of rushing water. “Oh.” She took out her water canteen and Naruto’s as well. “I’ll come with you.”

Sasuke pulled Naruto further into the forest undergrowth and pushed at a large fern until it mostly drooped over Naruto. This level of token camouflage accomplished, he set off with Sakura for the river.

“Sasuke,” said Sakura, when they had gone a little distance.

“Mm?” Sasuke scratched at his neck. Something dark flaked off. He grimaced.

“Can you tell me, next time, when you’re leaving?” Sakura gripped the canteens tight. “So I know where you’re going and … so I can — help.”

There was a long pause.

Sakura stared at the ground. The silence beside her felt heavy, pointed. Her skin grew hot. She shouldn’t have asked, she thought.

Then Sasuke said, “Yeah.”

Sakura’s head jerked up. She tripped over the uneven roots underfoot and would have fallen, but for Sasuke’s steadying hand on her arm. “Sorry, sorry,” said Sakura, hastily regaining her balance. She glanced at him shyly. “You will?”

Sasuke kept his hand on her elbow for a few seconds longer, looking at her feet as if to check that she really was steady. He didn’t say yes again, but he nodded, just once.

They walked the rest of the way in silence. But Sakura’s spirits were cheerful, buoyed by his agreement.

When the sparkling surface of the river came into sight, Sakura heard Sasuke’s long sigh. He handed her his water canteen. “Hold this for me,” he said. “I need to —” What he needed to do remained unsaid. Sasuke strode toward the river, stripping off his shirt as he went.

By the time Sakura reached the riverbank, Sasuke was already waist deep in the current, bent over and scrubbing his hair in the water. His skin gleamed palely in the sun, almost too bright to look at. Sakura blinked the sight, and hastily looked away, and then — helpless — peeked at him again.

She unscrewed the cap of a canteen and crouched down by the water to fill it. She called to him, “You’re going to get your bandages wet.”

“It’s fine,” said Sasuke, persisting in his misunderstanding of the word _fine_.

Eventually, he waded back to shore, where Sakura sat waiting for him, three filled canteens lined up neatly beside her. He picked up the shirt that he had left on the ground and went to wash it in the water. A mist of red plumed in the water as he scrubbed the shirt, quickly carried away by the current. When the water ran clear, he wrung it dry and brought it over to Sakura.

“Here,” he said, offering her the wet shirt. “Wipe your face.”

Sakura looked at him, surprised. She took the shirt and gently dabbed around the bruises on her face. She wiped away the sweat and grime on her neck. It felt amazing. “Woah.” She could feel the breeze on her face.

Sasuke huffed out a half-laugh. He went and rinsed the shirt out again, then came back and wiped down her good arm. “Want to soak to your feet?” he asked.

Sakura brightened. She followed him to a large rock protruding out of the water. Sakura took off her shoes and let her feet dangle in the river. The water was cooling. Sasuke flopped down next to her on the rock and lay back, limbs spread out, letting the sun dry him and his clothes.

A wind picked up, carrying on it the sound of rustling leaves. Next to them, the river burbled happily.

Sakura watched the silver streak of fish in the river. That reminded her — “We should catch some fish.”

“In a bit,” Sasuke murmured. His eyes were closed.

Sakura smiled. She looked at him, at the faint bruises under his eyes, and stayed quiet. A dragonfly flitted past. Sakura watched it skim the surface of the river. She wriggled her toes and felt the soft fluid resistance of the water. The clouds overhead drifted slowly. After the nightmare of the forest yesterday, this peaceful idyll by the river seemed almost impossible. Sakura breathed it in, and let Sasuke nap.


	12. Chapter 12

Sasuke did not let himself sleep too long. There was still a lot of ground they had to cover before they reached the tower. And Naruto was by himself, back in the forest.

But first: fish.

Sakura seemed to be in a good mood, looking at him with a sort of happy satisfaction, as Sasuke got out his shuriken wires. He didn’t know what she was so satisfied about. It was just fishing. He showed her how to tie the wires to kunai and how to aim for the fish through the water. It took her a couple of tries before she got the hang of it, and even then, she missed more often than not.

“You’re still aiming for the fish,” said Sasuke, reeling in his wire. He pulled a flopping trout from the water. “You have to aim just under the fish.”

“I get that,” frowned Sakura. “Because light bends in water, so it’s not a straight path to the fish. But I don’t know how much light is bending _by_. And how are you accounting for the current?”

Sasuke squinted at her. He didn’t know how to explain it. He’d never had to consciously account for river current or wind resistance or anything like that: his body somehow just knew. Sakura was still approaching it like a math problem. That would never do. “You need more target practice,” he told her.

Sakura blew out a breath. “I know,” she muttered. After a pause, she added, “But the target training grounds are always full. I get embarrassed practicing in front of people.”

What kind of ridiculous excuse was that?

But Sasuke remembered being six, and watching his brother at target practice, and secretly sneaking in after his brother had left, mimicking his brother’s movements. There were some things that you wanted so desperately, you could not bear to admit it to other people. Her embarrassment was — familiar, somehow. “Do you calculate the kunai’s height when you throw it?”

“Yeah,” she said, and rattled off: “y is h + vy × t - g × t² / 2, right?”

Who still remembered that, a year out of the academy? Whatever her faults, Sakura did not suffer from a lack of effort. Sasuke looked at her, this bookish girl with her weak arms and enormous brain, who always tried very hard. She was doing her best, he thought. 

“There are some quieter practice targets in the woods,” he said. Then, because in for a penny, in for a pound: “I’ll take you sometime.”

Sakura looked like she had swallowed a balloon, like she could drift away in a cloud of pink sparkles at any moment. Her eyes were the size of dinner plates as she looked at him.

Sasuke couldn’t understand it. He didn’t know why she was always so bizarrely happy around him.

“And you should start weight training,” he said, in an effort to dampen her spirits.

“ _Yeah_ ,” agreed Sakura, enthusiastically. “What kind of exercises do you do, Sasuke? I was _amazed_ when you hauled that boar up the tree, that was _incredible_ —”

Talk of weight training and Sakura’s cheerful chatter took them through the rest of fishing and cleaning the fish and gathering up their supplies. They were on the subject of diet regimens as they headed back into the forest. 

“But, don’t you think muscular girls are … not cute, though?”

“What?” Sasuke frowned at her. How did they get on the subject of girls?

“Never mind,” said Sakura. The nape of her neck was flushed a deep red. “What — uhm — what do you think is cute?”

Sasuke was assailed with the memory of aunts and neighbors and store clerks pinching his cheeks as a child. “What’s good about cute?” he asked, baffled.

Sakura looked away, into the forest. “Oh, hmm,” she said vaguely.

Sasuke gave it some thought. “Cats, I guess. We used to have cats,” he said, not quite sure why he was telling her this. He didn’t know why he told her so many things, but it was strangely easy to talk to Sakura. He thought maybe he liked the way she listened. “They look really soft, and they put their paws up, like they want you to pick them up, you know? And then you pick them up and they scratch you to all hell. That’s pretty cute.”

Sakura gave him an indecipherable look. After a long pause, she said in a complicated voice, “Okay.”

They had just reached Naruto when a loud boom sounded through the forest. Sakura clapped a hand over her ear, wincing. “What was that?”

Sasuke tossed her the brace of fish and bounded off to take a look. He’d only gone three steps before he remembered what she’d said to him earlier, so he doubled back to where Sakura was standing, holding the fish, looking rather down-spirited. She blinked when she saw him come back.

“Come on,” he said. If there really was danger in the woods, he didn’t feel good about leaving her here anyway: by herself, with a broken arm and an unconscious Naruto. He picked Naruto up — and that was getting old. His ribs ached. When was the idiot going to wake up? Had he hit his head? They really should get to the tower quickly and have someone take a look at Naruto. To Sakura, he said, “Let’s go.”

It didn’t take them long to find out what had made the sound. A group of Sound-nin were attacking the green kid and his teammate. The teammate was holding her own, but the green kid was bent over, hands over his ears. Sasuke looked more closely. There was blood leaking out of his ears.

“Lee,” gasped Sakura.

Sasuke glanced at her. She had said that the green kid had saved her life. That was a blood debt. That kind of thing was best paid off early. Sasuke didn’t like the idea of so heavy a debt hanging over her.

“I’ll go lend them a hand,” he said to Sakura, easing Naruto off his shoulder.

Sakura put a steadying hand against Naruto’s back. “Wait, but —”

It was a little insulting how worried she was, as if she had no faith in his abilities. A little insulting, and also a little … warm. “We owe them,” he said, and headed off before she could argue anymore.

The fight was nastier than he expected. The Sound-nin were not fucking around, their viciousness surprising him. But, strangely, they didn’t seem to be after the scrolls. After a while, Sasuke realized that they were after the Hyuuga.

The green kid’s balance was shot to all hell, after that damage to his eardrums — but his teammate was good with weapons and apparently had an endless supply of weapon scrolls at her disposal. Sasuke’s fire jutsus provided them with some cover, and after a while, the green kid seemed to rally through sheer force of will. Sasuke had to hand it to him: his taijutsu was excellent.

Then Sasuke felt a strange chakra at his back. The air crackled. They all stopped fighting, even the Sound-nin. He turned around.

The Hyuuga slowly gained his feet, some strange, cold malevolence pouring off of him. It felt … foreign.

It reminded Sasuke of the snake-woman.

A shiver went down his spine. Almost instinctively, he pulled back, drawing near to where Sakura was. They watched the Hyuuga backhand one of the Sound-nin. The Sound-nin went flying back twenty feet. In a flash, the Hyuuga was on him, pummeling with relentless fists.

“W-what’s wrong with Neji?” Sakura asked, her face pale.

“Something’s … strange with his chakra.”

“Was it —” Sakura stopped. She put a hand over her mouth. “His neck,” she breathed. “Where that woman bit him.”

A dark tattoo had formed.

It took both of his teammates to stop the Hyuuga from pounding the Sound-nin into a complete smear. By then, the strange markings had snaked their way up his neck, across his face, dark flickering shadows against his skin. He was smiling when the Sound-nin ran off — cold and cruel and familiar.

The specter of the snake-woman loomed over them. 

The weapons teammate had grabbed him by one arm and cried tearfully, “Stop, Neji, stop!” and the green kid grabbed him by the other arm and blubbered soggily, “There is no honor in going any further!” and the combined weight of his teammates seemed to bring the Hyuuga back to himself. He sank to the ground, looking dazed, looking like he had just woken up.

Sasuke had a bad feeling. “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Sakura. Lending a hand to repay a debt was all well and good, but he had no interest in dealing with the snake-woman’s fallout.

Sakura called out to the green kid that they were leaving.

“We are very grateful for your assistance!” said the green kid, in that weirdly earnest solemn way of his. He bowed, a perfect ninety degrees.

The weapons teammate absently called out, “Yeah, thanks!” but her attention was clearly still focused on the Hyuuga, who sat looking shakily at his own hands.

Sasuke didn’t quibble over these formalities. He hauled Naruto and Sakura out of there. His heartbeat thundered in his ears. The shadow of fear had cast itself over him again. It took several breaths for him to push that down. He heard Sakura sniffly wetly behind him.

Sasuke dumped Naruto on the ground and turned to her. Sakura noticed that they had stopped moving — and promptly sat down on her heels, burying her face in her arms.

Sasuke regarded her for several moments. He never knew what to do when she was like this. He couldn’t even blame her: he knew that she was afraid, and he knew why she was afraid. Fuck it, he was afraid too. He shuffled a few steps closer. For some reason, the memory of his family cats came to him. He crouched down next to her.

Sasuke cast about for something to say. “… Hey.”

“Wh-what happened to Neji?” Sakura said, wetly, muffledly, into her arms.

Sasuke didn’t know either.

Sakura suddenly lifted her head. Her cheeks were wet but her brow was furrowed — glaring at him, ferocious. Sasuke blinked, taken aback. She stretched out her good arm, and after a moment’s struggle with the sling, her broken arm as well.

“Woah, hey,” said Sasuke.

Sakura clapped her hands on both sides of his face and dragged him close. Sasuke froze.

“I called you a coward, and I was wrong. I’m sorry. I was wrong. Running away was the best thing you did. The _best thing_ —”

Sasuke tried to shake free, but her hands were over his cheeks, holding his head in place, facing her. _No_ , he thought — no, it had been cowardice, like his brother had said, cowardice, she couldn’t absolve him of it — but her arm was broken, and he was afraid to move too much, in case he hurt her.

“I’m so glad you ran! I’m so glad you got us out of there. No, _listen_ — you were right! The thirty-six stratagems, do you remember? The last one — number thirty-six, the stratagem for if all the other ones fail, is _to run away_. If all else fails, _retreat_. I’m so glad you ran. I’m — I’m so glad you weren’t bitten — that you didn’t —”

She hiccuped. Her chin wobbled. The next moment, she burst into tears again.

“I’m so glad it wasn’t you! Poor Neji — but thank goodness it wasn’t you, Sasuke! What _happened_ to him? He was so _different_! He was going to kill that Sound-nin!”

Sasuke reached up and curled his hands around her fingers. Her small little hands, with their slim pale fingers. Carefully he brought her hands down. He placed her broken arm back in its sling.

Sakura sniffled a few times. She wiped her eyes roughly with her good hand.

“And — and Sasuke, you can’t leave me behind next time.” Her eyes were still red around the edges, but her gaze was steady. She was serious. “Don’t leave me behind again. Even if you run, you have to take me too.”

He met her gaze. She wasn’t asking for just a heads up about where he was going. She really meant it — that he wouldn’t go ahead without her. Sasuke thought for a moment, and told her, “If you can keep up.”

“I’ll keep up." The set of her chin was determined. "I promise.”

“All right,” Sasuke answered. “Then I won’t leave you behind. I promise.”

The forest was still around them. Sunshine came filtering through the leaves overhead, shifting in a hazy, dappled pattern. Sasuke had the vague feeling that he was promising something much greater than he understood, but he couldn’t put the feeling into words. After a moment, he stopped trying. It wasn’t a bad feeling, in any case.

They remained crouching there for a little while. A breeze passed through, and the forest noises around them picked up again: tree leaves rustling, birds chirping, crickets singing lustily the song of summer.

From behind, Sasuke suddenly heard, “Sakura! I’ll protect you.”

Sasuke whirled around. Next to him, Sakura snorted out a laugh, “He’s sleep-talking.”

But she was mistaken.

Naruto, sitting up slowly, had finally woken up.


	13. Chapter 13

When they at last reached the Tower, Sakura was so tired her knees were starting to buckle. They went through the doors but the halls were empty. There was no one around.

“What the heck,” said Naruto, peering around in disappointment. “Where is everyone? What are we supposed to do?”

Sasuke went to the nearest corner and sat down in a motion that was really more of a collapse. “I don’t know,” he said, stretching out his legs, setting his back against the wall. He told Naruto, “You keep watch,” and he turned to Sakura, “C’mere, sit down”, and then he leaned back and closed his eyes and went to sleep.

Sakura’s head felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls. She limped her way to the corner and sat down too. The floor was hard and cold, but Sasuke was warm and sturdy next to her. She couldn’t really think of any reason not to lean against him. She heard, “Hey, hey, but what are we —” before sleep swallowed her.

They must have slept a very long time, because when Sakura woke again, the big room was milling with people. Naruto was sitting in front of her, looking bored. There was Ino’s team, a little further away; Lee’s team, standing together and looking better than when she had seen them last; and a lot of people Sakura did not recognize. She sat up.

“How long did I sleep?”

Naruto sagged, glumly. “ _Forever_.”

Sakura stretched out her back, then turned to Sasuke, who hadn’t woken yet. He looked exhausted. So Sakura let him sleep and told Naruto to leave him alone — and Sasuke slept, all the way until they had to line up and the third-round preliminary matches were announced.

When Sakura said that she would drop out, Naruto looked like she had stabbed him. It surprised even her, how hurt and betrayed he looked.

“ _Why_?” he asked, sounding close to tears.

Sasuke looked at her for a moment, before he gave a tight-lipped nod. “Go get your arm properly set,” he told her.

“Are you staying in?” she whispered at him furiously.

“ _Isn’t he_?” cried Naruto.

“Of course I am!” snapped Sasuke.

Sakura reached out and pressed a hand against Sasuke’s ribs. He hissed, drawing back. “Your ribs are definitely cracked,” she told him. “You’re going to end up with a punctured lung if you keep fighting like that.”

“I’m fine,” he insisted.

“What happened to you guys?” Naruto’s eyes darted between them. “What happened when I was out?”

Sakura hadn’t explained the snake-woman to Naruto in detail, and she didn’t have the time to do so now. She frowned at Sasuke, “A punctured lung’s three weeks' bed rest at _least_. You could do permanent damage!”

“Sasuke?” Naruto turned enormous blue eyes on Sasuke. “Are you —”

“Go away,” Sasuke told him. “It’s none of your business.” Then, to Sakura, in a low voice, “I know my limits.”

“You’re pushing yourself too hard!”

He shook his head. He looked at the other teams in the room. “I want to fight them.” His gaze focused on Naruto. “I want to fight you.”

Naruto looked like he had been paid the biggest compliment in the world. He rubbed his nose, bashful.

Sakura stared at them. Was it some kind of secret boy code? Why did it sound so incredibly — dumb? “What? _Why_?”

“To test my limits,” said Sasuke.

He must have hit his head in the forest, decided Sakura. How could he be spouting such nonsense? “You just said you _knew_ your limits! Why do you need to fight right now? You can beat up Naruto anytime. We live in the same village!”

“Hey!” protested Naruto.

“I need to know how strong I am,” said Sasuke. “I have to fight them, to measure myself.”

“Didn’t we measure that already, in the forest? We weren’t strong enough against —” Sakura faltered. She didn’t even want to speak about that person. “You know. You know how strong she was. And we weren’t.”

Sasuke looked at her, tight-lipped and tight-jawed.

After a moment, Sakura sighed. He had his own pride, she realized. They had run, and his pride was hurt, and she wasn’t helping things, throwing what he thought was his disgrace back in his face.

“No, you’re right,” she relented. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

He surprised her by taking her hand. She looked down at how his fingers wrapped around hers — how large his hand was. Broad and callused and rough, but he held her hand so lightly, almost gentle. He told her, “I’ll be careful.”

“You promise,” she frowned.

Sasuke squeezed her hand once. “Number thirty-six, wasn’t it? I remember.” Then he let go and went forward with Naruto.


	14. Chapter 14

Sakura did not say _I told you so_ when she visited Sasuke at the hospital the next day. She stood beside his bed and arranged the daffodils she had brought and said nothing about how he had been slammed into the ground during his match and how he had vomited blood all over the floor and how Kakashi had to haul him to the emergency room and how close he apparently had been to a collapsed lung. Sakura did not mention any of that.

She didn’t have to. From the moment she entered his room, Sasuke had not met her eyes. He stared at the wall in embarrassed silence.

When Sakura finished arranging the flowers, she pulled up a chair and sat by the bed. Sasuke was still avoiding her eyes. Sakura thought for a bit and offered, “You want to hear about the other fights?”

His head didn’t turn, but Sasuke looked at her from the corner of his eyes. He wanted to. But he said, “When’s your appointment?”

Sakura checked the clock. “Noon. We have some time.”

So Sasuke leaned back against the pillows, and Sakura told him about how Naruto had eked out a victory by the skin of his teeth, and about the dysfunctional Hyuuga family drama that had played out during Hinata’s match, and — why she had wanted to talk to Sasuke about all this in the first place — about Lee’s match.

“He stood up afterwards, but I heard that the sand had totally crushed the bones in his arm and leg. Kakashi said that opening eight gates meant certain death, and Lee opened up _five_. Why … why would he go to that extent?”

Sakura stared at the IV lines taped to the back of Sasuke’s hand. She thought maybe Sasuke would have some insight into why Lee would risk so much in one fight. Sasuke too had risked permanent injury during his match. And now he was lying here, in this hospital bed, after pushing himself past all sensible limits. Sakura couldn’t understand what the point was. 

But Sasuke stared out the window silently for a long time. In the end, all he said was, “Because he’s weak.”

Sakura swelled in protest. “Not Lee! You didn’t see how he fought! It was amazing. The force of his kicks were _unreal_.”

Sasuke’s gaze flickered to her. “He lost, didn’t he?”

“How can that be the only measure of strength?” Sakura protested. “Surely not! Lee’s loss was — was more impressive than Naruto’s victory!”

Sasuke’s gaze floated out the window again. “Naruto, huh,” he murmured, almost too quietly for her to hear. “… He won.”

Sakura paused. Frowning, she sat up, trying to catch Sasuke’s eyes, but Sasuke looked determinedly out the window. Sakura’s thoughts raced. Was he that upset to have failed the exams?

It was embarrassing, she supposed, that they might be genin still when Naruto became a chuunin. Still, they had to take the long view here.

“You know,” she told Sasuke, “after I dropped out, I went up to the stands to watch your match. And Kakashi-sensei was there. And I was … really ashamed for a moment, because I was the only one in our class who had dropped out. Was I embarrassing him? So I asked him, Kakashi-sensei, am I doing a bad thing?

“And Kakashi-sensei kind of smiled at me, you know how he does it. He said it was okay, I was okay, that the most important we learn is being able to say when enough’s enough. So … can’t you say that this is enough, for now? It’s already three weeks’ bedrest like this. If you’d kept going, what if — what if you ended up like Lee? Or Hinata? They had to carry her out on a stretcher because her heart stopped. There will be other chances. There’s an exam every year, I’m sure Kakashi-sensei will —”

“I don’t care about the exam.”

Silence fell over them. 

Sakura looked at him hesitantly. “What…do you care about then?”

Sasuke turned his head away on the pillow, facing the opposite wall. He made no reply.

What could he be upset about? If he didn’t care about the exam, then why did he care about losing? Was it just that he hated to lose? Was it his pride?

Was he … jealous?

Of Naruto?

That seemed impossible. What did Sasuke have to be jealous of? Naruto had improved a lot since graduation, but he and Sasuke were still on different levels.

Sakura tried to imagine it. Ino was moving on to the finals, and Sakura was not. Was she jealous of Ino? Sakura chewed it over. She supposed she was wistful, maybe; she wished she were moving on to the finals as well. But Sakura had made the decision to drop out, and that couldn’t be faulted on Ino.

“Are you upset that you lost?” Sakura asked quietly. “Or that Naruto won?”

She tentatively poked Sasuke’s hand with her own. He didn’t turn his head, but he didn’t move his hand away either.

After a while, Sakura sighed. “I don’t know,” she said to the ground. “It’s not fair, because you carried him through the forest and you got us the scrolls and you didn’t make it past prelims. But it’s not Naruto’s fault that he won over his opponent, is it? It’s just … luck of the draw. Like Lee. It’s not fair that Lee fought harder than anyone and still lost. But … he got the sand gourd as his opponent, and he couldn’t win.”

It was not much of a conclusion, but it was all that Sakura had. There were a lot of unfair things in the world, she thought, but she couldn’t see any way around them.

After a moment, Sakura felt a poke against her finger. She lifted her head, and saw that Sasuke had turned back around and was looking at her. She braced herself, in case he wanted to argue some more — but Sasuke only said, “ _You_ got us one of the scrolls.”

The knot of frustration in Sakura’s chest suddenly loosened.

“I did, didn’t I?” she smiled.


	15. Chapter 15

Afterwards, Sakura went to her appointment to set the break in her arm. Sakura’s nurse was a smiling, elderly man, who clucked his tongue sympathetically when he looked at her head wounds. Her scalp had bled and scabbed over after the snake-woman ripped out chunks of her hair.

“Wound’s deep,” he told her.

This was not good news. Sakura asked waveringly, “My hair will grow back, right?”

“We’ll do our best.” He brought out a pair of shears and buzzed away the hair around the scabs. Sakura hissed. The skin there was tender. “Hurts, doesn’t it? You’re getting some pus here, we’ll have to clean all this. Do you want me to just buzz off all your hair? It’ll be easier to maintain, while you’re healing.”

Cut off all her hair? Sakura looked at him with horrified eyes. “… Bald?”

It was one thing to walk around with blue and violet bruises all over her face — a hat and sunglasses could cover a lot — but to shave off all her hair! Sakura couldn’t imagine it. Short hair might be styled fashionably, but a bald shave! The stares she would get!

“No, no,” said Sakura, cold just at the thought of it. 

When the appointment ended, Sakura headed immediately for the restroom. She peered at herself in the mirror. It was worse than she had feared. The whole area behind her left ear to the top of her head had been shaved. Gingerly, Sakura rearranged the part of her hair, to try and cover as much as she could. She didn’t consider herself particularly vain but even she had her own girlish pride.

On her way back from the hospital, she ran into two unlikely figures sitting together on the front step of a convenience store, popsicles in hand. Their blond heads were bent close, glinting in the summer sun. They seemed to be deep in gossip.

“— Kakashi-sensei wouldn’t tell me _anything_ ,” complained Naruto. “Even though he disappeared for so long with Eyebrow Teacher after Neji’s match! Neji’s not even in our year, though, you know?”

“You don’t suppose Kakashi-sensei is going to train Neji?” Ino gasped.

“No way!”

“But you said he wasn’t going to train you, and no one else on your team made it through to —” Ino broke off, seeing Sakura approach. “Oh, hey, Forehead.”

Naruto turned around, brightening. “Sakura!”

Sakura eyed Ino suspiciously. “What are you two gossiping about?” She turned and poked Naruto in the head. “And you: don’t go babbling nonsense to other people. She’s in the finals too, you know? Be a little bit more suspicious.”

Naruto blinked at her, once, twice — then, as if realizing that he had been tricked, swelled up like a bullfrog in summer. “Are you spying on me?” he asked Ino, outraged.

Ino waved a careless hand. “Look, what’s a little information exchange between classmates? Didn’t I buy you a popsicle? Don’t be so paranoid, Forehead — but _what’s_ going on with your hair? My goodness.”

“Never mind that,” said Sakura, awkward and self-conscious. She sat down on the ground next to Ino. “What’s this about Kakashi-sensei?”

“Really, you could do something with it at least,” fussed Ino, picking at Sakura’s bangs. “And I don’t know what’s going on with your teacher, which is why I was _asking_.”

Ino and Naruto filled Sakura in on what they did know: Kakashi and Gai had been cooped up in the Hyuuga manor since yesterday; even the Hokage had been to visit; Kakashi had told Naruto that he had found someone else to teach Naruto fundamental shinobi skills —

“I don’t think he’s planning to train you,” clucked Ino. She squinted at Sakura, shook her head, and said, “Hang on,” before disappearing into the convenience store.

Naruto looked at Sakura with forlorn eyes. “But…why wouldn’t he? He’s _our_ teacher, right?”

Sakura frowned, her thoughts still lingering on what was happening in the Hyuuga manor. Whatever the snake-lady had done to Neji must have been serious. Even the Hokage had been pulled into it. A cold shiver passed through Sakura at the thought of what might have happened to her … or to Sasuke. 

As for Naruto: “Who did he choose to teach you, then?” Sakura asked curiously.

“I don’t know,” muttered Naruto. “He said something about basics or whatever. That’s not what I need!”

“You’re pretty terrible at those,” Sakura said in frank assessment.

“Basics don’t win you battles! I want to learn something big! Impressive! Doesn’t he have a bunch of — you know! Secret killer moves that he could teach me?”

Sakura hardly knew what to say. She thought that basics were worth something — surely, there was value to having a sturdy foundation; surely, the skills of a shinobi were acquired incrementally, built one on top of the other — but that was the sort of thing she might have lectured Naruto about two weeks ago. Now, it felt strange to lecture Naruto. He had made it through to the finals and she had not. 

The memory of Sasuke and his frustration, back in the hospital, came to her. Sakura felt a pang of sympathetic embarrassment. Really, if Naruto was going to make chuunin ahead of them …

Well, what of it? Sakura sighed helplessly. How could she begrudge him?

So Sakura sat quietly, staring up at the blue sky, and listened to Naruto grouse. 

Eventually, Ino came out of the store with a gauze scarf in hand. “Here,” she said. The scarf was yellow, with pale butterfly patterns. Ino tied it over Sakura’s hair.

“Pretty,” said Naruto, pausing in the middle of his tirade. He held up a thumb in approval.

“He’s an idiot with no taste,” said Ino, over Naruto’s indignant squawks. “But he’s not wrong.”


	16. Chapter 16

It was cherry season, so Sakura brought some with her when she went to visit Sasuke the next day. She set the basket on the bed next to his legs and went to open the window. When she turned back around, Sasuke was staring blankly at the fruit.

“Have some,” said Sakura, pulling up a chair. She reached into the basket and helped herself to a handful.

Sasuke did not follow her lead. Instead, he peered at the cast on her arm. His gaze wandered up to the stitches on her brow and finally settled on the scarf over her hair. “Let me see your head.” 

Sakura almost choked on a cherry stone. “What?”

Sasuke beckoned with a hand. Sakura stared at him for a beat, and then, curious and uncertain, she leaned forward, until her head was just next to his.

He untied her scarf. Sakura felt his breath on her ear, soft, as his fingers passed through her hair. What was he doing? Sakura’s cheeks burned. Sasuke continued touching her hair. She worried her heart would thump out of her chest.

“U-uhm! I heard that Naruto is getting a substitute, because Kakashi-sensei…” In a desperate attempt to hide how loudly her heart was beating, because he was _touching her_ , Sakura told him the gossip she had heard yesterday. 

Sasuke occasionally said _oh_ or _huh_ , but mostly, he frowned at the top of her head. When he probed at the bruises on her scalp, Sakura could not help but hiss. Sasuke let go and sat back.

He was still frowning. “What the hell is this?” he asked, handing the scarf back to her.

“… a scarf.”

His frown deepened. “Why didn’t they shave your hair? The cuts are infected, did you know?”

Sakura’s grip on her scarf tightened. “I know,” she said. “They told me. And they said it would be easier to keep clean if I shaved my head, but … but I just have to be more careful, if I didn’t shave.”

“Are you an idiot?” said Sasuke, witheringly.

Sakura pressed her lips together. That was unfair, she thought. She had thought things through, she had considered everything carefully. It wasn’t stupidity on her part. “No,” she said stubbornly. “I just didn’t want to.”

Sasuke flung off his bedsheets and swung his legs off the side of the bed, glaring at her the entire time.

“Wait,” said Sakura, as he stood up. She was so startled she forgot her own hurt. “Wait — are you supposed to —”

“Stay there,” he snapped at her.

Sakura froze, half-standing, half out of her seat. She watched him stalk out of the room. Slowly, Sakura sat back down. It was strange. She rarely ever saw him so angry. And what was he angry about? Shouldn’t she be the angry one? How could he say things like that to her? How could he call her an idiot? It was her hair, and it was her infected scalp, and it was her who would have to be stared at. He didn’t understand. 

She thought they had been getting along better since the Forest of Death, but he was still as sharp-tongued as ever.

From the hallway, she heard the sounds of low discussion, and then a sharp voice, “ _What_ are you doing? Get back in bed!”

That answered the question of if he should be up and walking.

But Sasuke did not immediately reappear in the doorway. Sakura waited some more. Several minutes later, he came back, something black and bulky in hand. Sakura stared at it.

Hair clippers.

“Where did you …” Sakura broke off. That wasn’t important. “No, I said — I said I don’t want to.”

Sasuke cast her an unimpressed look as he went and plugged the hair clipper into a wall outlet.

“You don’t understand,” tried Sakura. “It takes so long for hair to grow out. And — everyone will stare at me if I shave my head. I’ll be a total weirdo.”

Sasuke approached her with the hair clippers, face impassive. Sakura stood up from her chair with a clatter. “No,” she said. They faced each other, only an arm’s length apart, the hair clippers between them. “No,” she said again. Why was he being like this? Why wouldn’t he listen to her? “I don’t want to, I said.”

“It’s just hair,” he told her. “It’ll grow back. But infections aren’t something to mess around with. You have to keep it clean and dry. Your hair’s getting in the way, so shaving’s the best thing to do. You know this. Don’t be stupid.”

It was the most Sasuke had ever said to her. It was the most he had ever said to anyone, in her memory. But Sakura shook her head. Even if it was him, even if he said that —

“It’s not just hair,” she said. “You don’t understand. Girls care about this kind of stuff. Maybe it’s stupid, but — it’s my hair. It’s my hair, and I don’t want to be laughed at. People will laugh. I don’t want to be laughed at.”

“Who’s going to laugh at you?” demanded Sasuke.

Everyone would. They had laughed at her forehead, and her forehead wasn’t even that large. They would laugh at her bald head. They would laugh and point and whisper among themselves, and Sakura —

“They will,” said Sakura waveringly. Tears stung her eyes, threatening to overflow.

That was apparently the end of Sasuke’s patience. He spat out a swear. Then he turned on the hair clippers.

Sakura gave a yelp and ducked her head, covering her hair with her arms. She braced herself. She’d fight him if she had to, Sakura thought. If he tried to shave her by force, she’d… she’d punch him in the ribs.

But no hands reached for her. No footsteps approached. After a few moments, Sakura hesitantly lowered her arms. She peeked up.

Sasuke had not reached for her. He had brought the clippers to his own head.

Sakura stared, half aghast, half amazed, as Sasuke stood there, head bowed, buzzing off his thick dark hair. Clumps of it fell to the ground, where they pooled in an inky pile. Slowly, the round contour of Sasuke’s head grew apparent, the curve of his skull visible. She could see the pale skin of his scalp through the short buzz.

“Sasuke,” breathed Sakura.

He made no reply. A breeze came through the open window, fluttering the curtains, pushing at the stray bits of hair on the ground. Sasuke turned his back to the window and continued. Methodically, he ran the clippers over his head, one line after another, over the top and down the back, until his hair was completely shorn. Until there was nothing left.

He turned off the clippers and looked at Sakura.

“Who’s going to laugh?” he asked. “I’ll break their arms.”

Sakura made a noise somewhere between a cough and a hiccup — a wet laugh. Sasuke beckoned to her again. This time, she went.

“Stop crying,” he told her.

Sakura scrubbed her eyes dry and pulled up a chair. Sasuke turned on the clippers again. Sakura bent her head and felt the press of cold metal against her nape. The breeze came through the window again. She watched locks of her pale hair flutter down and join his dark hair in the pile on the floor.


	17. Chapter 17

Sakura brought a basket of oranges the next day, half of which she took out and set on the small table next to Sasuke’s bed. She set the basket with the remaining oranges on the floor, and then took a seat.

Sasuke looked at the basket for a beat, and then he sat up and reached over and took the orange that Sakura had been trying to peel one-handedly. He made short work of the skin. The smell of bright citrus wafted into the air. “Who’re those for?”

“Lee,” Sakura told him. “I heard he’s still in the hospital, so I thought I’d go see him after I visit you.”

“Lee,” said Sasuke, staring at Sakura.

“Yeah, he was pretty badly hurt in the prelims. I told you about his fight.”

Sasuke handed the peeled orange back to Sakura. She looked at it for a bewildered moment — he seemed to not understand that he was the patient here. As she was splitting the orange in half, though, Sasuke was already pushing his bedsheets back and getting out of bed.

“Wait, should you be — aren’t you supposed to stay in bed?”

“It’s fine,” said Sasuke, picking up the basket. “Let’s go deliver the oranges.”

How had _visit_ become _delivery_? Sakura wondered. She set the orange down and hurried after Sasuke out the door. Lee was in a different department than Sasuke’s, so Sakura asked a nurse for directions and then led Sasuke up two flights of stairs.

“You really don’t have to come with me,” said Sakura awkwardly.

Sasuke shot her an indecipherable look. She didn’t know what he meant by it. But Sasuke said nothing and Sakura did not know how to ask. So she observed him instead. He seemed to be healing well — his movements were smooth, and he was able to go up the stairs without visible signs of pain. They went down a hallway, turned the corner, and there it was — Room 605.

Sasuke handed Sakura the orange basket and sat down in one of the plastic waiting chairs by the door. Sakura asked in surprise, “Are you not coming in with me?”

“No,” said Sasuke, stretching out his legs. “Come out when you’re done.” He took an orange from the basket.

“You have a whole pile in your room,” said Sakura.

“What’s one more?” Sasuke started peeling the orange. “Miser.”

Sakura wrinkled her nose at him, and then went through the open door into Room 605.

Lee’s arm and leg were bulky in their casts and additionally swathed in bandages. His leg was held up in some sort of sling suspended from the ceiling, and he had a brace around his neck. But his eyes were alert, and he brightened when he saw her. “Sakura!”

“Hello,” said Sakura, unsure as ever of how to respond to Lee’s obvious enthusiasm. “How are you?”

He was in excellent condition, he said, except of course for the broken bones and torn muscles and ripped tendons, but the prognosis was good. Probably good. He was confident it could not be bad, at least. He was hopeful about what the x-rays were saying, and even more hopeful about what the MRIs scheduled for the afternoon would show.

“Well, I’m … happy to see you in good spirits,” said Sakura tactfully. “I brought you some oranges.” She looked at him with his casts and then she looked down at her own cast: neither of them were in a position to peel oranges. She set the basket on the bedside table.

“As I thought,” declared Lee, “you are so good and kind, truly a blossom worthy of —”

Sakura hastily cast about for a change of subject. “Have you had many visitors so far?”

“Yes! Gai-sensei was here yesterday morning and evening, and Tenten came with him in the evening — but …” A frown furrowed Lee’s brow. “Perhaps you know. Neji is unwell, too. They have been busy between the two of us.”

Oh, right. Even the Hokage had been to the Hyuuga manor. “How is Neji?”

Lee was silent for some moments. A shadow passed over his expression, unfamiliar on his open honest face. “He is … not himself, sometimes,” said Lee. “You saw, in the forest. He had a terrible fever. I hear sometimes very bad fevers can cause damage, or otherwise change a person. I hope it is a temporary thing.”

Was it because of fever? Sakura thought about how menacing Neji had seemed, and what Sasuke had said, that his chakra was different — she had never heard of chakra changing as a result of fever. But she knew little on the subject, and could only offer, “I hope he gets better soon.”

“Yes,” said Lee.

They fell silent, preoccupied with their own pensive thoughts. Sakura tried to shake off her feeling of gloom. It was hardly appropriate for a hospital visit. But the memory of the forest came over her, and she could not summon the cheerfulness suitable for a get-well visit. Meanwhile, Lee seemed deep in thought about Neji’s situation, and he gazed somberly at his own leg cast. The silence stretched out between them, heavy and gray.

Sakura heard footsteps, and the next moment, she saw from the corner of her eyes an arm reaching into the basket on the bedside table. She turned. Sasuke had come into the room, and was leaning against the wall, calmly peeling an orange.

“You mind?” he asked Lee, when he saw her glaring at him. Sasuke held up the orange briefly.

“What,” said Sakura. “Those are for him.”

“No, no, not at all!” said Lee. “Help yourself.”

Sasuke helped himself. “There’s plenty,” he assured her. To Lee, he said, “Tell me about your match. I missed it. Looks like that Sand kid got you good.”

Sakura gaped at him. How could he say that, so bluntly, while Lee was still lying in the hospital bed?

But Lee said warmly, “Truly a formidable opponent! His sand shield is nigh impenetrable! Gai-sensei said to me, even before the match, that the gourd he carried on his back was a suspicious thing. I should have kept that more in mind.”

Sasuke chewed on an orange slice. “Walk me through it. How did it open?”

“I started with a leaping head kick, but his sand blocked me —”

It was strange and kind of amazing, how well Sasuke and Lee could talk with each other. Lee walked Sasuke through his prelim fight, move by move, and Sasuke squinted at the floor, as if visualizing the fight in his head. Sakura thought that Lee might be saddened or depressed by talking about the fight, but he seemed fired up and happy to have found an audience. Sasuke’s attention was perfunctory at first, but the more Lee talked, the more engrossed Sasuke became — and when Lee described Gaara’s sand cocoon, how bits of his face had flaked away as sand, Sasuke’s whole attention was engaged.

Boys liked talking about fights, supposed Sakura. Still, she was grateful to Sasuke, for coming in and livening the atmosphere. That was a sentiment she never expected to have. She sat back and prepared to wait quietly until the discussion finished.

But after a while Sasuke tilted his head and frowned and asked her, “What do you think? How would you get around that sand shield?”

Sakura blinked, surprised. “Me?”

Sasuke nodded.

Sakura thought for a moment. “I don’t know … Lee did everything you could do in terms of speed and strength. That sand moves so fast. I don’t know how Gaara was controlling it. I guess — maybe if you treated it like a body extension? Maybe it gets heavier if it’s wet? Would that affect Gaara’s control? Or … you know, how if lightning strikes sand, it forms glass? Does a transformation to the essence of his sand shield affect his control of the sand shield?”

Lee’s eyes were wide as he looked at her. Sasuke handed her two wedges of orange.

“I told you,” Sakura sighed, “these are Lee’s.” But she ate them anyway.

“No, please,” said Lee politely, “I’m happy to share.”

Sasuke gave her a look, as if to say, _There. See?_

They stayed another quarter hour, discussing the fight. Sasuke asked about Lee’s leg weights, and about his general training regimen, and then shook his head and said, “That seems … intense”, which Lee seemed to take as a compliment. Sasuke ate another three oranges. Eventually, Sakura dragged Sasuke away, if only to save Lee’s fruit basket from total devastation.

“He’s really something,” said Sasuke, as they went down the stairs.

“You’re really something,” Sakura told him frankly.

Sasuke ignored this. “That Sand kid must be a monster. But it’s bad luck Lee ran into him — a physical barrier defense like that is the worst against taijutsu.” He looked up the stairwell for a moment. “Shit, he does fifty laps around the village every morning?”

Sakura shuddered.

The next moment, Sasuke turned on his heel and went running up the stairs. Sakura froze for a moment, caught off guard. “Wait — where are you going?”

She followed after him. It soon became apparent that he wasn’t going anywhere. He was doing stair climb exercises.

“Stop it! Your ribs!” Sakura shouted.

She found him six floors up, leaning against the wall, one hand pressed against his ribs, grimacing.

“Don’t,” he said, slightly out of breath.

“I _told_ you.”

“Fuck off.”

“Let’s take the elevator down,” sighed Sakura.

She helped him to the elevator, and they slowly made their way back to his room. Sakura smoothed out his blankets after Sasuke sat back down on the bed. “Why didn’t you just come into Lee’s room with me to begin with?” she asked. “If you wanted to hear about his fight?”

“I didn’t especially,” said Sasuke. He leaned gingerly back against the pillow. “Just got quiet in the room. Didn’t know what was happening.”

What did that mean? What could have been happening in the room? Sakura looked at him strangely, but Sasuke was fussing with the pillows and didn’t see. After a moment, she gave up and sat down.

“You want another orange?” Now that they were finally back in his room, with his own oranges.

He made a face. “No,” he said. “I had six already. That’s plenty.”

Sakura really could have cheerfully thrown the oranges at his head, she thought. He’d deserve it.


	18. Chapter 18

Kakashi finally showed up that night, the first Sasuke had seen of him since Kakashi dumped him on an emergency room gurney and said that he was going to “get a cup of coffee, hang on.”

“Sorry, sorry,” said Kakashi now, perching on the windowsill of Sasuke’s hospital room. He held one hand up apologetically, and his eye curved in a placating smile as he lied through his teeth, “I got accosted on the way to the vending machine. A giant green beast dragged me off.”

Sasuke stared at him flatly. He managed to keep _Where’s your coffee_ safely clamped in his mouth. He wasn’t Sakura or Naruto: he wasn’t going to shout _You’re late_ like he gave a shit about Kakashi or something.

“So, bedrest for three weeks,” clucked Kakashi. “My, what spindly ribs you children have.”

Sasuke was pretty sure that if he tackled Kakashi out of the window, he could make it look like a reasonable accident. A pity they were only two stories up. That height wouldn’t even scratch Kakashi.

“What are you here for?”

“To see how my dear student is, of course!” smiled Kakashi, but he unfurled his legs and stepped down from the windowsill. He turned the bedside chair to face the opposite way, and then sat astride it, his arms folded on the back of the chair. “Tell me about the snake-master, in the forest.”

This again. People kept asking Sasuke about things he had no interest in recounting. _Tell me about your brother. Tell me how you ran from him, when he was killing your family_. _Tell me about the snake-master_. _Tell me how you ran, when she was beating Sakura_.

 _Tell me how you ran_.

“I lost against her,” admitted Sasuke. His fingernails dug into the flesh of his palms, but he forced the words out. The only thing more humiliating than losing a fight was not acknowledging it. The only thing more humiliating than cowardice was lying about it. “I lost the fight, and then I ran.”

It was fine. He was fine. Hadn’t Sakura said? _The best thing you did, Sasuke_. _The best thing_.

“She was strong,” said Sasuke. “Her taijutsu was fast. She could summon snakes, big ones. I … didn’t test out her ninjutsu.”

“Was there anything strange about her?”

Where to even start with that question. Sasuke told him about the whole creepy tongue thing, and what Sakura had said about the distending neck, and the weird _hunger_ in the snake-woman’s eyes.

Kakashi’s shoulders drooped as he listened to Sasuke, and eventually he put a hand over his eyes, and then put his head down against the back of the chair. “Haha,” came faintly from underneath the mask. “What fucking shit is this.”

Sasuke had to give credit where credit was due: Kakashi was a pretty disinterested, lackadaisical teacher, but he never tried to put on any teacherly airs. All his bullshit was upfront and clearly fake. He didn’t care enough to cultivate a deeper, more personal layer of bullshittery: once you got past the top layer of insincere friendliness, Kakashi was pretty honest about how totally done he was with everything. Sasuke appreciated that.

Eventually, Kakashi pulled himself together. He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “You’ve probably heard that Neji was bitten. The saliva in the bite formed a cursed seal. That would be a big of a problem by itself, but … Well, I guess you would know. About the Hyuuga’s branch family and their … practice.”

When Sasuke’s father had been alive, the thing he most liked to complain about at the dinner table had been the village council’s systemic undermining of police authority, but his second favorite subject had been: the upstart Hyuuga clan and their barbaric ways—

“Barbaric,” remembered Sasuke.

“… I see that some prejudices are so deeply ingrained you probably inherited them. Well, that’s above my paygrade. In any case, seals — especially seals on humans — are unstable things and when you have two seals on the same human, they tend to interact. But I can’t get a straight answer from anyone about how either of the seals are meant to work. Politics are a scary thing, kid. D’you know anything about this? Your family has a bloodline limit too.”

Sasuke stared at him, and then pointedly shifted his gaze from Kakashi’s exposed eye to his hidden one. Sasuke’s family had a bloodline limit, and the bloodline had been pretty much wiped out — but there Kakashi sat with a Sharingan, nonetheless. Sasuke’s cousin was more than a decade in the grave but his Sharingan was still as bright and red as fresh blood.

“Ah,” said Kakashi after a moment.

The Uchiha and the Hyuuga had been feuding since before Sasuke could remember; he suspected Kakashi was right that some prejudices were just inherited. The Hyuuga thought police work low and degrading; the Hyuuga sat on the village council and were proud of their elevated status. The Uchiha thought it all meaningless puffery: what did prestige and wealth mean, when half the clan were branded like cattle? _If they really gave two shits about their precious eyes being stolen_ , Sasuke’s father used to fume at dinner, after the village council cut police funding again, _they’d brand the whole clan with that damn seal. I’ll gouge out Hisashi’s eyes the same way I could Hizashi’s!_

Sasuke’s clan didn’t need a cursed seal. After all — his brother had done a more thorough job than any cursed seal.

They sat in silence for a while. Sasuke’s ghosts were many, but sometimes when Kakashi was quiet like this, he thought that Kakashi’s were not few either. Sasuke wondered which cousin it had been to give Kakashi his Sharingan, and how they knew Kakashi. But some ghosts could not be disturbed, so Sasuke did not ask. 

“Well,” said Kakashi eventually, “that’s the rough shape of things. I’m trying to defuse this bomb on the kid’s neck, but I have no schematics and a half million false leads and a councilman pain in the ass, so it’s going to take a while. You’re on bed rest, and Sakura has a broken arm — I think we can reconvene after the exams are over, what do you think?”

“I’m not going to be on bedrest until after the exams,” protested Sasuke.

“Oh?” said Kakashi interestedly. “That’s not what your medical charts say. Well, good luck with that. I’ll arrange something for you then. Some nice light training, hmm?” He smiled, pleasant and amiable.

He didn’t wait for Sasuke’s reply. He didn’t say _How are you feeling?_ or _I hope you get better soon_ or any of that sort of meaningless pleasantry. He just waved and left the way he had come: through the window.

Afterwards, Sasuke stared up at the white ceiling blankly for several long moments.

So Kakashi would arrange for some kind of substitute teacher for him, the same way he had for Naruto. Each of them going their own way. Their training would be their own business. Perhaps that was as it should have been, from the start. Sasuke smiled grimly to himself — what even had been the point of Team 7?

But he caught himself. There was still Sakura. Her oranges were piled on his bedside table, the only bright splash of color in the room. There was still Sakura, whose arm was broken, but whose legs were fine and who could still hold a kunai. Sasuke laid back against the pillow and looked out the open window. The night wind blew by, rustling tree leaves and carrying on it the sound of cicada cries. He remembered, vaguely, the forest and telling her about target practice places. He had said, _I’ll take you sometime_.

Would Kakashi arrange someone for Sakura? Sasuke didn’t even need to finish the thought to answer. Of course he wouldn’t, because they were all pain in the asses for Kakashi, and Sakura was the most well-behaved pain in the ass. Sakura wouldn’t push, so Kakashi wouldn't remember — and Sasuke was struck with the terrible realization that this was how things worked for Sakura. She was obedient, and didn’t make trouble, so no one worried about her.

The girl couldn’t even hit a fish in water at five paces, thought Sasuke irritably. Why didn’t people worry?

That thought kept Sasuke up even when the lights in the hallway dimmed and the hospital fell quiet and dark. Was she washing her hair appropriately? Was she keeping the cuts in her scalp clean? And then there was Naruto: what training was he receiving? What new techniques was he learning?

The hands of the clock slowly ticked away the night.

Sasuke sat up. He shoved aside his blankets, and jammed his feet into hospital slippers, and went out into the hall. Down the hall, up the stairs, following the path he had taken in the morning. He came to the room and slipped inside.

Lee was snoring, fast asleep. Sasuke bent down next to the bed, “Hey.” Lee kept snoring, so Sasuke put a hand over Lee’s face and shook him.

Lee woke with a start. “Huh? Wha—? Sasuke?”

Sasuke took a seat in the chair. “I can’t sleep,” he declared. “Tell me about how you came up with the Front Lotus.”

“Huh?” Lee squinted blearily around. “It’s — it’s one in the morning.”

Sasuke waited.

As he expected, Lee did not disappoint. He rubbed his eyes, and yawned several times, and mumbled, “Front Lotus? Front Lotus — oh! My Front Lotus? You want to hear about how I came up with it?” His eyes snapped open. “Yes! Well, it took me a while, because it requires at least one of the Eight Gates to be opened. So I had to train for that first. But for the Front Lotus, the key realization is that movements require exerting a force _against_ something. So if you’ve been kicked into the air, there’s nothing to exert against and that is its own form of immobilization. But first you have to kick the other person high enough … ”

Sasuke sat in the dark, listening to Lee talk about taijutsu theory. Lee was annoyingly over-enthusiastic, and prone to hyperbolic comparisons, and used too many poetic flourishes — but his understanding of taijutsu was excellent, and his battle tactics were solid, and his approach to fights were novel. It was like listening to a combat lecture at the academy, if the lecture was delivered by a newspaper subscription salesman.

Slowly, Sasuke felt the tensions of the past several days bleed out of him. He had lost the preliminaries, while Naruto had not — that galled. He could hardly admit it to himself, even if Sakura called it “unfair”. But what was fair in the world? How could he still believe in fairness?

No, he was an Uchiha. His people believed in strength. They did not brand each other in “main” and “branch”: the only differentiator they believed in was strength. Strength was not inherent. Strength could be acquired. He had forgotten that lesson. Naruto had acquired strength somehow — but the road was long, and Sasuke had only momentarily fallen behind. But now he had work to do. He had to learn, and train, and grow stronger.

He had to move forward.


	19. Chapter 19

When Ino saw Sakura, as Sakura pushed through the front door of the Yamanaka flower store, the bell jangling merrily overhead — Ino made a noise like a dying frog, and then threw her hands up in the air and declared, “I give up! I try so hard, and what do you end up doing! What is this! Where’s your hair?”

But even as she complained, she was pulling wire and florist’s tape from behind the counter, and hauling up a pot of chrysanthemums — all the supplies necessary to make a flower crown.

Sakura looked at Ino for a long moment, unspeakably fond. She had underestimated a lot of things in the past, realized Sakura. Ino’s kindness, for one — and also her own strength. Sakura liked a boy, and wanted to protect her feelings for him; but Ino was also dear to her, and Sakura wanted to protect these feelings too.

“Nah,” said Sakura, smiling. “Don’t worry about it. This is a special haircut.”

Ino paused, regarding Sakura suspiciously.

“It’s a couple’s haircut,” said Sakura. “Sasuke cut it for me.”

Ino threw down the florist’s tape in disgust. “Get out of my store.”

“How dare you.” Sakura lifted her grocery bag onto the counter. “I brought you cheesecake.”

“…Fuck,” said Ino.

They went into the backroom of the store to eat the cheesecake, sitting among pots of gardenias in the doorway so that Ino could keep an eye on the counter, in case any customers came. The soft sweet smell of the white flowers curled around them gently.

“How’s your training going?” asked Sakura.

“I hate it,” said Ino muffedly, through a mouthful of cheesecake. “What even is the point? If I’m out in the field, it’s going to be with Shikamaru and Chouji, in Ino-Shika-Cho formation. Why do I have to prepare for individual combat? Besides, I don’t plan on going out in the field. Ugh, I hate it, I hate how these exams keep pandering to combat specialists.”

Sakura blinked. “You don’t want to go out in the field?”

“Why would I go out in the field?” Ino pointed at Sakura with her fork. “Look at you. You’re what happens out in the field. You’re all tanned, and your nails are a mess, and your face is a mess, and you _shaved your hair_. Fuck no, I don’t want to do field work.”

“What do you want to do then?”

“I don’t know — there’s a ton of stuff! Medicine, or interrogation, or politics, or administration. I’d even rather do police-work inside the village, than run missions outside of the village.”

Sakura rested her chin on her folded arms. “I guess. You know Sasuke’s family used to do police-work?”

Ino gave her the stink eye. “There’s a guy with good sense. It is so unfair. Why is he on your team?”

“That’s just his family though. Sasuke’s definitely going into combat work.”

“What a waste of his good looks,” sighed Ino.

Sakura hid a smile behind one hand. “Oh, you haven’t seen him yet. He shaved his head too.”

Ino stared at her, stricken.

“Yeah,” said Sakura with relish. “Totally bald. Just like me.”

Ino raised a fist threateningly. “You! What use are you? Why didn’t you stop him? I’ve been thinking this for a while but — Don’t you know good looks like his need to be protected? I saw him at the prelims and he was totally sunburned! Why aren’t you telling him to put on sunscreen?”

Laughing, Sakura warded off Ino’s air punches. “I think he looks good tanned. Don’t you think so? He looks good, kind of rough… ”

“No!” said Ino heatedly. “His best look was definitely back in the Academy. He’d be reading, and his hair would kind of fall into his eyes, and there was never a more beautiful, refined boy —”

“What!” yelled Sakura. “His best look is — ” But too many thoughts came to her: Sasuke, stripped to the waist, standing in the river shallows; Sasuke, frowning and sweaty, kunai in one hand and up to his elbows in blood; Sasuke, head bent in concentration as he patched up her wounds — “All of them! He’s always handsome!”

They almost toppled out of their chairs, swatting at each other and laughing. Eventually, they sorted themselves out and straightened. Ino helped herself to another slice of cheesecake. “What about you?” she asked. “Are you on break until your arm heals?”

“I don’t know what’s going on with Kakashi-sensei,” sighed Sakura. “I haven’t seen him since the prelims. And Naruto has his special training, so Sasuke and I are kind of at loose ends. But — Lee’s in the hospital too, and Sasuke keeps making him give us … taijutsu lectures.”

“Lee? The bowl-cut guy?” Seeing Sakura nod, Ino exclaimed, “What! Really?”

“Yeah, it’s weird how well he and Sasuke get along,” said Sakura. It wasn’t that Sasuke and Lee were friends, exactly. But Lee seemed happy to have someone sit there while he monologued enthusiastically about the advantages of rotational wrist-locks over hyperflexing wrist-locks; and Sasuke seemed interested in learning about wrist-locks. Sakura couldn’t really understand it, and she couldn’t really understand the difference between rotational and pronating and hyperflexing, but she did her best to listen, and then she went home and looked up the terms in her old Academy textbooks.

Sakura and Ino chatted a bit more, but customers came into the store, so Ino had to go back to work. Sakura waved goodbye and headed out. The sun was climbing in the sky. Sakura went to her taijutsu lecture.


	20. Chapter 20

Sasuke was not in his room at the hospital, and when after several minutes there was still no sign of him, Sakura went searching. Eventually, she found him sitting on the waiting chairs outside Lee’s room.

“Why aren’t you going in?” asked Sakura, taking a seat next to him.

Sasuke tilted his head toward the door. Sakura paused, listening. Muffled voices came through the closed door: a soft, steady patter from a girl, punctuated occasionally by loud exclamations from a man.

“Gai-sensei and Tenten are here?” guessed Sakura. Digging through her bag, she pulled out a container of grapes and offered some to Sasuke.

“Lee got his test results back this morning.” Sasuke took a grape and rolled it around between his fingers, hesitating.

“They’re good grapes, really sweet, I bought them this morning. What’d the results say?”

Sasuke ate the grape. “Too much damage to his bones. He’ll be lucky to walk again. No more fights.”

Sakura stared. The container of grapes slipped from her nerveless fingers, and would have fallen, but Sasuke reached out in time. He caught the container, and fitted the lid over it again, and set it aside on an empty seat.

“You don’t like grapes?” asked Sakura, stiltedly. She could not comprehend the enormity of what Sasuke was saying. What did _no more fights_ mean? How could that be? No more fights, ever? But — Lee was still a genin. They were all still genin.

“They’re okay,” said Sasuke, slouching back in his chair. They sat in silence for several moments, while Sakura stared at Sasuke and Sasuke stared at the floor. After a while, Sasuke picked up the container again, and took off the lid, and held it out to her: “You like them? Have some more.”

Stupidly, Sakura ate a few more grapes. The cold, sweet burst of juice on her tongue pulled her mind out of its stricken stupor. “Then … what are the chances of Lee walking again? Isn’t there something they can do with physical therapy? He stood up again after the match, doesn’t that mean his legs are still okay?”

But Sasuke had no answers for her. He shrugged, wordlessly. The two of them sat there in silence, listening to the low hum of hospital noises around them: machines beeping, and nurses chattering, and the voices coming through the door next to them. It was chilly, in the hospital hallway, and the fluorescent lights overhead were a washed-out white. The heat and splendor of late summer outside seem terribly far away.

Sakura asked, “How did Lee take the news?”

“I don’t know,” said Sasuke. “His team was already in there with him when I came up. One of the nurses told me what was happening.”

Sakura sighed, rubbing her forehead. “Should we go in and say something?”

Sasuke looked over and regarded her with dark inscrutable eyes. “No,” he said. “Especially you. Don’t go in.”

Sakura bristled. “What? Why not me? I can be comforting! I — brought grapes!”

Sasuke shook his head. “He wouldn’t want you to see him like this.”

“But like this is when I _should_ go see him. He needs his friends’ support. Isn’t Tenten in there?”

Sasuke gave a dry laugh through his nose, just a quick puff, turning his head away. After a moment, Sakura realized what he had meant. She sat back, cheeks burning. Lee didn’t think of her as a friend like Tenten, and more to the point, Lee didn’t _want_ to think of her as a friend like Tenten. Sasuke knew that, because … Sasuke had been there when Lee asked her out and promised to protect her for life —

“I don’t think of him that way,” she told Sasuke hastily.

“I didn’t ask,” said Sasuke, offering her some more grapes.

“But I think I can still be friends with him, at least,” Sakura continued. She ate her grapes, and tried to ignore the incredible strangeness in talking to a boy she liked about a boy who liked her. “It’s just — he saved my life. I feel like, when something so big and so terrible happens to him, I should — show my support, however small. Besides, _we’re_ friends.” She peeked at him: he didn’t refute her. “I’d want you to come see me if — if I had a debilitating … condition.” 

Sasuke leaned his head back against the wall. He stared up at the ceiling, squinting at the light panels. He closed his eyes.

“I wouldn’t want you to come see me,” he said.

That took her aback. “No way!” said Sakura furiously. “How can you say that? If you get hurt, don’t you _dare_ try to keep it from me! Of course I’m coming to see you! ”

Sasuke smiled very faintly, and didn’t open his eyes.

They subsided in silence. Next door, the voices in the room continued. Team Gai was apparently a team of chatty talkers. Well, amended Sakura, except for Neji. Thinking back on it, what awful luck Lee’s team had had this round of chuunin exams. First Neji, and now Lee. Sakura leaned her head back against the wall as well.

“Is this just how exams go?” she asked Sasuke. “Is it always so brutal, like this?”

He didn’t answer immediately. Then: “What isn’t brutal?”

Amazing, thought Sakura. He was truly terrible at comforting people. She had expected it, but it still surprised her, just how awful he was. The unrelenting grimness of his reply was almost absurd: it startled a laugh out of her. She sat up. “Sasuke,” she said.

“Hmm?”

He was terrible at comforting people — but not brutal, thought Sakura, looking at him fondly. Hadn’t he made the exams a lot less brutal for her? There was her answer. “Here, have some more grapes. I bought these for you.”

He cracked one eye open and took a single grape. She watched as he rolled it from one side of his mouth to the other — like a child, pushing vegetables on a plate. 

“You don’t like grapes, do you?”

“They’re okay,” he said again.

Really, really not brutal, thought Sakura, biting down on a smile.

Eventually, conversation inside the room tapered to an end. When Gai-sensei and Tenten came out, Sakura stood up and exchanged greetings with them. Tenten had other business and left first, but Gai-sensei seemed particularly touched that “Kakashi’s students are so passionate and tenderhearted, to come visit Lee!”

“Ah,” said Sakura, eyeing the passionate and tenderhearted Sasuke.

“I’ll go in and see Lee,” said Sasuke, obviously running away. Apparently the miniature version was preferable to the adult version.

“Wait —” Sakura half-wanted to go with him. But there was Gai-sensei out here to deal with, and what Sasuke had said before weighed on her. She didn’t know if Lee wanted to see her. “Tell him … that I hope he feels better, and please don’t give up, and we support him.”

Sasuke nodded, and then made a wide berth around Gai-sensei and ducked into the room.

Gai-sensei fisted one hand over his heart. He seemed to be struggling against powerful emotions. “How thoughtful of you! Yes, it is for the best you stay out here! A man’s tears cannot be so easily shown to his springtime flower!” 

“Ah…” said Sakura. Did even Gai-sensei know about Lee’s romantic inclinations?

Tears were now spilling out of Gai-sensei’s eyes. He seemed unabashed about it. “And your teammate! What a considerate boy! So discerning, so understanding! A model of passionate youth! Reminds me of when Kakashi was young.”

Sakura stared.

“Kakashi is really too cool — it infuriates me! But there is no helping it. Especially now! He is much much better at ninjutsu than I am; I can only rely on him to help with Neji’s situation. Curse how clever he is! I have run 500 laps around the village in self-reflection. But Kakashi has not forgotten his dear students! We’ve talked it over. Since I have stolen your teacher’s time from you, I will be certain to make it up to you!”

“Uh,” said Sakura, with a creeping sense of dread.

“I’ll see you at the training grounds this afternoon! Do not worry: I will be as strict and rigorous a teacher as if you were my own students! Let’s have a beautiful training session together!”

His teeth glinted at her. How could his grin be so blinding, even in fluorescent lights? The next moment, he was gone. Sakura stood flabbergasted in his wake. It was like a hurricane passing through. Sakura sat back down and tried to process what Gai-sensei had said. Was he going to train them now? She really could not summon up enthusiasm for the idea. Sakura swung her feet idly and blew out a breath. She wondered what Sasuke would make of the situation.

Sasuke had left the door to the room open. From her seat, Sakura could faintly hear their conversation inside: mostly Lee speaking. He was still as talkative as before, even if he sounded uncertain. That was a relief.

“… dismayed. Of course I was! But I promised myself 100 push ups every time I think of giving up. I am still a shinobi!” Lee gave a loud, wet sniffle. Sasuke coughed, the fakest and most awkward sound Sakura had ever heard from him. So Lee was probably crying, and probably as unabashed and open as his teacher had been just now, in the hallway. “But I — the path before me is not clear. I almost think there is no road. What kind of a taijutsu specialist cannot walk? Gai-sensei says that the strongest muscle in the human body is the heart, and that I must train my heart first. Surely the rest will follow? Do you think so?”

Sasuke gave another one of those incredibly fake, awkward coughs. Sakura thought he would give a quick assurance and then excuse himself from the room; it was a surprise, when Sasuke stayed quiet. She wondered what he was waiting for.

Then, in a low voice, Sasuke said, “I had a great-uncle.”

Sakura sat up, alert.

“He was the police chief, when my father was a child. A great shinobi. But he went blind after a few years. His eyes just gave out, for some reason.”

Sakura held her breath.

“Even so. Even with something as debilitating as ... blindness, in my clan — still, no one could replace him. Strength makes its own way.” He paused, and then said again, “Strength makes its own way.”

Sakura didn’t hear the rest of their conversation. Her heart felt like a balloon in her throat. Sasuke never talked about his family. She didn’t know the specifics, but she knew that something awful had happened. Even on the bridge in Wave, Zabuza had said that Sasuke was from ‘that tragic clan’. And yet, here he was, talking to Lee about his great-uncle …

Sakura stared at the door.

It was not much longer before Sasuke came out. Sakura stood up, and without a word went to him and flung her good arm around his neck. Sasuke froze.

Sakura pressed her face against his shoulder. Her heartbeat was thunder in her ears. She said muffledly, “You’re really …” 

The least brutal boy in the world.

Sasuke was stiff when Sakura pulled back. He looked at her, and then away, and then at her again. “Don’t be weird,” he told her.

Sakura gathered up her things and slung her bag over her shoulder. She pulled at Sasuke’s wrist. “Come on, let’s go get lunch. Gai-sensei said to meet him at the training grounds later. Did Kakashi-sensei mention any of this to you? You don’t think he’s just given up on us …?”

Pulled along, Sasuke followed her down the hall.


End file.
